Wednesday, August 5, 2009

I wrote a whole entry about cleaning windows.

This is insanity. Monday I did... I don't remember what I did. But I was productive. Ish. I do know that I went to bed at 8:30 and slept in half-hour increments for the next 11 hours. It was a very weird night, one of those ones where your dreams mingle with the waking world, and even though you know these worries and weird things are not real, your mind just keeps picking at them obsessively so that you cannot get back to real sleep. Oh. No one else does this? Carry on, then!

Yesterday I did eleventy-five loads of laundry AND folded it all AND put it away. And every time a load got done, I thought, "Yesss! More laundry to fold and put away!" I thought this without a trace of sarcasm in my mind.

Last night my champion sleeper (ahahahahah, that is so a thing of the past, though she's still a pretty good sleeper, I suppose, and if this is not just a phase that 9- and 10-month-olds go through, I will probably kill myself) woke up at 3:45 and stayed that way until 6:30. I coped by going downstairs and eating a metric ton of black cherry frozen yogurt (and yet I still weighed one pound less this morning). Seriously, I have tried everything I can think of (short of booze; I joke about doing this, but I wouldn't actually, and I hope I didn't have to tell you that) with this kid. I do not know what to do with her. Why would a formerly awesome sleeper suddenly do this? I NEED ANSWERS.

(Before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, I do know that thousands of other kids do not even sleep through the night until they're three. If you tell me your cat just died, I will not yell at you about how I've lost three grandparents and a father-in-law, and IF I COULD BE SO LUCKY I WOULD BE GRATEFUL. Don't worry; if you are one of my friends on here, I am not talking about you. I am talking about other people who do the drive-by notes, which are so often private. I am VERY grateful that she sleeps as well as she does, but when you get used to a thing, and then suddenly that thing turns into a nightmare, it is hard to get unused to it. And I handle sleep deprivation about as well as Bill Clinton handles celibacy.)

Ahem. So. I slept about three hours last night. That's because even after she finally settled, I kept dreaming that she was crying, so I'd wake up in a panic, all, "Oh, not again! What's wrong this time?"

I thought today would be awful. I thought I would spend it lying in bed, trying to recover from the insane amount of work I did yesterday and from a sleepless night. After I fed Grace, I did lie in bed for a while. I watched her bop around our room, mostly between the window fan (if she had a boyfriend, that would be it) and the air filter (and she'd be two-timing it with him).

For the first time in weeks, I enjoyed her instead of just gritting my teeth through yet another day. She made me giggle. I made her giggle. I felt a little of this yesterday, but today I really felt normal and happy again. Not that I've been depressed for the past month, but I have definitely not been myself. Tired and draggy, horrified at the thought of almost all food, yet constantly starving. I had some (pregnancy-safe) anti-nausea pills that really helped, but they also made me drowsy, and yesterday was the first day I didn't need them. Oh, it was great.

About a half hour of that, and I suddenly realized that even though I'd picked up our bedroom yesterday, it wasn't clean, and it was vitally important that our bedroom be spotless and sweet-smelling today. No, yesterday, and oh my gosh it's too late I need it clean now. I wiped down every surface with Murphy's Oil Soap (they need to make a room spray that smells like that; it is the best smell in the world), including the baseboards and window trim and ceiling fan. I vacuumed, and then I vacuumed some more. Then I started in on the windows, and this is where the DOOM! music starts.

These windows. I have not cleaned a window in this house since we first moved in, and now I remember why. When we first got here, I tackled the two front windows in the living room. They were horribly dirty, yet mostly web-free, which is why I chose them. It took me FOUR HOURS. Yes, that is a "four", and that is an "hours". It took me four hours partly because I am crazy and a perfectionist, but mostly it took me four hours because the window needs to be completely disassembled in order to be cleaned. And even THEN you cannot clean it completely. Not even with a toothbrush. It's like Martha Stewart's worst nightmare.

One of the major attractions of this house when we moved in was the new windows. "New windows!" we said, "Energy savings!" we said, "Ease of use!" we said. Silly young couple. These windows have slots up the sides that are JUST narrow enough that they cannot be cleaned with towel, finger, toothbrush, or scalpel. They can be mostly clean, but never completely clean. Do you know what kind of goop collects in those slots? Do you have any idea? It is the stuff of nightmares. And, while the windows swing out nicely so that it is easy to clean both sides, heaven help you if you accidentally take it all the way out. The first time I had to put a window pane back in, my belly was the size of Morocco, and I hadn't eaten all day. This time around I thought it would be easier. Nope. Not in the least! Also, the tabs that slide back and forth so you can swing the window in and out are textured plastic and screwed into the window frame. To clean it (and they were really filthy; this is not a case of me being crazy), I had to unscrew and disassembled each tab, let them soak while I cleaned the rest of the window, then scrub and dry them before putting them back together. This assembly includes one (1) tiny spring, like what you might find in a pen, one (1) small disk-thingy whose purpose I have yet to ascertain, one (1) textured bracket (hi, dirt! come live with us! forever!) that fits over the whole assembly, and one (1) tab onto which you have to fit the spring perfectly before you put the whole thing just right into the bracket, and oops, that spring likes to pop off, and oops, if you put it on just wrong, you have to disassemble the whole thing and start over because otherwise your window will fall out in the middle of the night or possibly on your child's head in the middle of the day.

I had NO IDEA that a window could make me so angry. Anyway, this time around it only took three hours to do the two windows. This does not include the twenty minutes I spent ducking and weaving when a sneaky bee zoomed into the house in search of...? No idea. I think this is the same bee that tried to traumatize me last summer while I was cleaning radiator covers in the front lawn. Perhaps they are attracted to Pine-Sol, my second favorite cleaning supply.


I am still losing weight. Doctor's appointment tomorrow. I will ask about this because I did not have anything like this problem last time. Even with all the not eating and throwing up more often and feeling like poo, I still gained about ten pounds during first trimester. I have LOST almost ten pounds during first trimester. The vain side of me is thrilled, but I know it's not something you want to have happen during pregnancy. Not ten pounds in a month. I thought that it might stop last week, when I suddenly started feeling a little better and eating more, but it didn't. It slowed, but I'm still dropping weight.


I've run out of things to say.

Here is a grainy photo from my MacBook camera:

Photobucket


It's grainy, but it so perfectly captures her personality: maniacal happiness and constant movement. Also, you can see the hideous former color scheme of our living room. The camera does not adequately capture the horror, but it's close. Imagine both those colors just a little bit pukier, and you'll have it. We can't bring ourselves to repaint the door. It is too awesomely horrific.


To clarify: I don't feel rotten anymore. I feel awesome, for the first time in weeks, despite my lousy sleep. I'm baffled by this compulsion to clean, clean, clean (even though I know it's just nesting), but I feel great.

6 comments:

  1. Wow, what a little beauty! She looks so happy and energetic :) (Just a shame they can't use all that energy up during the day instead of saving some until stupid o'clock in the morning, isn't it?). :D

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  2. Thanks! We're a little fond of her ourselves. :)

    And yes, I know! What kind of sane person wants to party in the middle of the night? Oh, wait. I did, about seven years ago. Still...

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  3. Hiya. I wondered when I saw your tweets about the windows. I wish I'd had the nesting impulse back when I had the energy to do that stuff, because I'm just starting it now and I'm the size of a HOUSE and I get braxton-hicks if I THINK about bending over. (Ironically, I'm having one right now after WRITING about it. stupid belly.) So, your house is cleaner than my house, and I'm jealous.

    Anyhow.

    I'm thrilled you're feeling better. As for the weight gain, I know stories about someone else never QUITE make you feel better and of course my stories aren't quite good enough anyway but just to let you know, (1) I lost a total of about 7-10 lbs over my first trimester and the doctor was actually encouraged because I started out overweight (i was just eating healthy, not dieting. last time i was nauseous ALL DAY EVERY DAY for 2 months and i gained like crazy.) and (2) my stepkids' mom actually had a total weight change of DOWN 10 lbs for the entire pregnancy - I'm talking about all the way at the very end, 9 mo preg, 10 lbs lighter than when she started. And it sucked for her apparently, but it was ok.

    Also, I realized that you need to post MORE PICTURES because I couldn't remember ever seeing one of that sweetly smiling face before, which could be pregnant brain, or clicking on all the wrong posts, but still. Always need more pictures of cute sweet babies, always MORE!

    And finally... I'm so sorry about the waking up thing. I have nothing useful to add about that, but I really am sorry for you. *hug*.

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  4. and no, i can't post a short comment. it's, like, not part of my idiom. [ten points if you get the reference]

    maybe this is why i don't post on my own stupid blog. :P

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  5. also for some reason i thoguht you said you lost 10 lbs in a month and that's why i said my story was different, but now i went back and realized it's actually quite similar except i don't mean to imply that you could have started out overweight. just that i did, so it was good for me. yeeeah. it's like 1:30 am so i'm stupid and i'm shutting up now.

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  6. She's so adorable! I agree with the previous poster, we need more cute baby pictures! I'm sorry that she's sleeping so poorly, though. I know it gets unbelievably rough when you aren't getting sleep. Mine slept pretty terribly and I was getting so tired of people asking me, "So is she sleeping through the night?" even though I know they were just making conversation. Such a relief when she finally got it all together. My husband still tells me about how insane I was the first few months with my first daughter, though, how I'd do the strangest, most irrational things because I was so sleep-deprived. Oy.

    Congratulations on feeling better! I haven't done the math; does this mean you're into the second trimester? Or did it just sort of happen this way? Regardless, enjoy your "nesting," or at least the results of it. And if you're ever in the Boston area and want to take a whack at my house, I'll get up at night with your little one. :)

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