Monday, June 7, 2010

I can't remember what this entry is about.

I know a lot of you have been clamoring for pictures of Emmy. I, too, would like photographic evidence of her early existence so she doesn't think she was secretly adopted. However, we have now lost the power cable to the stupid camera. And cell phone pictures are never good unless it's outdoors in blazing sunlight.

I don't know what's with me and losing things. I often think that I have mild ADD, but then I meet someone with actual ADD and realize that it's probably just really poor mental discipline on my part.

I have lately become incredibly flaky. While I'd love to blame it on the Spawn, I can't. They sleep fifteen and eighteen hours a day, respectively, and are both very low maintenance when they are awake (well, low maintenance as far as small children go).

I've forgotten to RSVP to something like five different events in the last two months. I've invited people over and then completely forgotten they were coming until they showed up at my door. The other day I almost walked out the front door without a shirt on (I so wish I were joking).

Since Emmy was born I have found no fewer than five unsent thank-you notes for baby gifts. And one of them was a note that got sent with a bunch of others, except that I forgot to put a stamp on it, so it go sent back and sat on our dining room table for two months.

I just found a pile of birth announcements that never went out. I know you have six months to send them, but more than half got sent months ago, so there are probably more than a few people out there wondering why they weren't good enough to get an announcement when everyone and their brother did already.

People, I'm losing my mind, and I don't know why. I started doing Sudoku puzzles, but they haven't helped. I just dream all night of giant man-eating numbers.

Maybe I inadvertently ate a human brain and contracted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

(yes, I HAVE watched too much X-Files; why do you ask?)


Speaking of Crazy, Saturday night I woke up four times, certain that centipedes and spiders were invading my bed.

If I ever really do get attacked in bed at night, James will sleep right through it. And then he'll probably be the leading suspect in the murder investigation, and a jury will never believe that he slept through his wife's stabbing, poor man.

So, just in case, you heard it here first: Dear jury and policepeople, if I'm ever found stabbed to death in bed, it totally IS possible that my husband never woke up. He's become very desensitized to nighttime screams over the last seven years.


Is it weird that I really love our pediatrician and want to be her BFF? She's really pretty and has fabulous hair (no, really, it's GREAT hair). Also, she is very funny. Did I tell you about the time I took Grace in for an appointment after Haircut Fail #3 (wisps all over the place, like a glam rocker), and she made a joke involving David Bowie and The Labyrinth?

Anyway, we had an appointment today. Emmy is FREAKING ENORMOUS, but we knew that already. I know someone whose baby was something like 20 pounds at four months, but other than that, I've never seen such an enormous child that age. She's 17 pounds and 27 inches. And since she still has ultra-stumpy legs, about 21 of those inches are in the torso. She's wearing 12-month onesies (barely) and 3-month pants.

Also, we are done with swaddling, hallelujah! I love swaddling in the early months. I credit that and Baby Wise for my remaining sanity. But the continuing dependency on it is a royal pain. Now, if we could just get Emmy to take a bottle again, life would be perfect.


Yes, you read that right. Emmy Does Not Appreciate the bottle. It used to be, I'd give her one every night or every other night, and she'd slurp them down with no fuss. Obviously, the girl didn't care where her food was coming from, so long as she got it, and she got a lot of it.

But I was not vigilant enough. She took to them so readily and kept it up for so long that I figured we were in the clear. Pumping and then giving a bottle is such a pain that I slacked off. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to go out, so I had Jeremy try a test-run a couple days before, just in case things had changed.

That went over like a lead balloon.

If I went out often enough, or if I had a job, or if she didn't sleep eleven hours a night, we would definitely just let her go hungry for a day until she broke down and took the bottle. But it's just not worth it. I can get out of the house after she's gone to bed, and she only eats every 3.5 hours now, so it's not the horrible burden it was with Grace (who ate every 2.5 hours for MONTHS).

We're going to keep trying, though. It's like us getting a second car. I rarely use it; the van just sits in the driveway most days, but knowing it's there makes me feel so much better. I'd like to be able to know I can go out for an evening if I want to.


Oh my, it's 3:30. Emmy has been sleeping for almost three hours. I should go wake her.


PS If you would like a birth announcement, I have a few left over. I sent a few to some of you, and I meant to send a few to some of you but forgot to find addresses or get stamps, and still others I probably would have meant to send to you except I got distracted by something shiny.

5 comments:

  1. I'd love a birth announcement, but there's the small problem that you, like, don't actually know me, so would probably be weirded out. :) But good luck on getting them and the thank-you notes sent out!

    I wonder if your flakiness is anything like my husband says that I was like in the first months after my first daughter's birth. I'm not really sure what I did, but he said I was just very irrational. Huh. Maybe you need Google calendar. I live by it, because I seem to have this idea that I can memorize everything that I'm going to do in a given week or so and that I won't forget. Uh, right. Bad idea. So I set reminders, and it emails me when something is coming up. I even have it set to email me every Monday night to put the trash out for Tuesday morning. I'm not sure how you'd set up a reminder to wear a shirt, though. You might be on your own for that one.

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  2. Nah, not weird. I can be reasonably sure you're not a creepy stalker person. My theory is that I'm in less danger from the Internet than I am from the weirdos who live in my town and can follow me home from the grocery store any time they please.

    But I don't like soliciting people for their addresses in case I seem creepy, so I tend to leave it up to them whether or not they want me to have their address.

    Okay, so I DO keep a calendar on my computer, and I DO set it up to send me email reminders for EVERYTHING. The problem is that between making said plans and getting to my computer, I get sidetracked and then completely forget that I even have friends, much less that we occasionally hang out and do things and that I have a computer on which to record these events.

    I don't think this flakiness is child-related. I've always been very distractible and terrible at multitasking (part of the reason I'm so awful at cooking meals on time; zero ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once), and I've always been forgetful. And this didn't really start until a few weeks or maybe a couple months ago. I dunno.

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  3. I used to feel fairly sane with a great memory. Since having children my memory's been shot and I feel completely unorganized. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the hormone changes women undergo during pregnancy. It wasn't until I was pregnant with Maddie that I started losing my keys and forgetting just about everything Mark ever tells me which leads to plenty of frustration. I thought it would go away after babies were born, but no. I'm still suffering. I'm a victim of pregnancy induced chaos.

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  4. (This is Dindrane from over at the forum, hi!)

    You know, I am highly, highly reliant upon both my Outlook calendar at work, and my Google calendar at home. I also have this whiteboard that I bought and hung up in a prominent place to remind me of things I need to do sort of immediately. I never use the whiteboard, of course, though it was a nice idea.

    I manage to do alright when it comes to not just completely forgetting about every single thing I have to do, but I also have no children. Even if it's not hormone-induced or whatever, children still make things chaotic just because they're children. And they generally have at least some demands that must be taken care of right-this-second on a daily basis. That sort of thing does tend to make one lose focus.

    So I guess, in conclusion, I really can't blame you for losing track of all kinds of random stuff. :)

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  5. Hm, I'm behind the times, but I would enjoy one! I didn't do birth announcements, you're light years ahead of me in organization.

    Did you ever find your camera cord?
    Also, what kind of camera do you use?

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