Petroni

Mid-winter Monday

2012-01-30T20:21:00.001-05:00

The sun is shining brightly today, and at Emily's suggestion we bundled up the kids and headed to the National Zoo for what turned out to be my favorite zoo experience ever.

The national zoo is spread out over a gigantic hillside, and in warm weather it's incredibly hot and crowded and generally annoying, especially when you're pushing 50 pounds of kid and stroller up that hill. Today, though, it was cold enough to be practically deserted, and it was so great to give Nate some freedom to run around and look at the animals without worrying that he'd get lost in the crowd. We took it easy and didn't try to see too much before bailing for nap time, and it was just so great to be outside for a little while. We've been too cooped up.

* * * * *

February is going to be a challenging month, in some respects. David will be traveling several times for work, which always puts Nate on edge. I'm going to give myself permission to eat junk food and buy a couple of On Demand movies, and I'm going to be sure to set up lots of play dates.

I'm a little worried that being on my own so much will throw a kink in my dinner-making streak. Y'all, I have been kicking dinner's rear. But it's one thing to bother cooking for myself and David, and quite another to bother cooking only for myself. (Unfortunately, Nate hardly eats what I cook.) I think I might scrap the regular meal plan when David's gone and just make really easy things for myself, like loaded baked potatoes and spaghetti with jarred sauce.

Nate and I are also planning to DRIVE to Michigan to see Arwen and Bryan and the kids. It sounds a little insane to propose that driving by myself with a two year old might be preferable to flying by myself with a two year old, and maybe it won't be. But I'm pretty intimidated at the thought of wrangling his car seat onto a plane and setting it up alone, and I'm convinced he's too wriggly to stay put in his own seat with just a lap belt.

When I initially thought about driving, I'd thought that if he's loud in the car, at least I'm not getting death stares from other passengers. And then I realized that Pittsbugh--where my in-laws live--is exactly halfway between my house and Arwen's. And suddenly it dawned on me that two five-hour legs with a grandparent visit in between seemed infinitely do-able, and that driving would provide a lot more flexibility in the event of a snowstorm or something. (NOT looking likely with the 50-plus degree weather we've been having on the regular around here.) It also helps, of course, that driving is a lot cheaper than paying for two plane tickets plus the inevitable baggage fees. So we're going to go for it!

* * * * *

The biggest thing I'm worried about both with regard to the trip and to David being away is Nate's sleep. He's gone from being a kid who consistently slept through the night to one who frequently wakes at least once. He often ends up in our bed for at least a little while, though he rarely falls back asleep there. Instead, he wants one of us to go and rock him in his room until he's good and ready to go back into his crib . . . which sometimes takes quite a while.

I've read that there can be a sleep regression somewhere during age two, and often around 27 months, which is right where he has been during this recent hiccup. Last night he woke up around 1:00, fussed a bit, and put himself back to sleep, only to wake again just after three and spend the rest of the night in our bed. (It would be sort of sweet if he didn't force both of us to pretty much hug the edges of the mattress.)

It's NOTHING like when he was an infant, when I positively dreaded bedtime, not knowing how quickly and how often I'd be roused from sleep. But it's reached the point where I lack any confidence in sleeping uninterrupted.

Let's hope he sleeps well tonight, friends.

Resolved

2012-01-12T15:53:00.000-05:00

We got the tree and all the Christmas decorations down on Sunday afternoon, and I immediately felt better about the State of my House. It's not that it was truly messy or cluttered with the decorations up, but we had reached the point where all I thought about when I looked at them was the fact that the task of taking them down still loomed ahead of me, and dread is not the feeling one should experience when gazing upon the Holiday Cheer.

Plus the tree goes right in front of one of the windows in our great room, where I spend almost all of my time, and between the light it blocks from outside and the fact that David likes to unscrew the recessed light above the tree, it was feeling a little dark and closed-in. (Which is difficult in our house. We have a LOT of windows. A LOT.)

Now it feels to me like January Proper, which means it's time to think about all the things I'd like to improve or accomplish this year. The thing I'd like most out of 2012--to have another baby--is pretty much completely out of my control, so let's focus on things I can actually manage, shall we?

-1-

Eat dinner at home more often. And I don't mean takeout at the kitchen table. We spend an absurd amount of money on restaurant food, and it's just unnecessary. Although I don't hate cooking, I do hate thinking about what to eat, making grocery lists, and procuring food. (What a freaking first-world problem, right?) To combat my inherent tendency to freeze up like a deer in the headlights when confronted with the question of what to cook in any given week, I've eliminated the weekly planning part completely. Instead, I've made myself a Google doc with two charts, each with four weeks' worth of meals, five meals per week. One of the charts is filled with fall/winter meals, and the other with dinners more appropriate for spring/summer. Between leftovers and still allowing ourselves one restaurant night per week, I imagine I'll really need to pick only four out of the five every week. But the planning? It's done--for the year. A four-week rotation seems more than sufficient to avoid boredom, and I already arranged it so that there aren't, say, three soups or three Mexican-type dishes in the same week.

I am far too excited about my meal chart, and it has already made the grocery list-making so much easier.

-2-

Read the entire Bible. I've been meaning to do this for years, and for some reason just never got around to it. I even bought one of those one-year Bibles (organized into daily readings, so it's all out of order), but it didn't work for me. This year, I purchased a Bible for my Kindle and found a Catholic Bible-reading plan (it has to be Catholic, because a Protestant plan wouldn't include all the books we use). I just printed out the plan and folded it up to keep in my Kindle cover. (The plan is available here partway down the page, if you're interested.) It's been really easy so far to just read the chapters for the day when I happen to pick up my Kindle, and I get some geeky satisfaction from being able to check off the day's readings on my list when I'm done.

Those are my only two real "resolutions," I think. I don't want to set myself up to fail. But there are, of course, other things I hope to do in 2012:

-3-

More exercise. We joined a local gym last year and hardly ever went. For me, there was the brief pregnancy and then the miscarriage and then being bummed about the miscarriage and then just not being in the habit of going and then being on fertility meds . . . and it just never happened. It was CRAZY, CRAZY cheap to renew for this year, though (seriously, I think it was something like $215 for BOTH of us for the whole year, at a gym with tons of equipment and TVs on the cardio machines and a pool and classes and whatnot), so we did it. I've already been five or six times this year, which is saying something. I've been doing Couch to 5K on the treadmill and not worrying about making myself try to take advantage of all the intimidating strength training machines; it's better to just go and do SOMETHING, even if it's just walking/running on the treadmill. So there's that.

-4-

More books, less television. I already do a pretty good job of not watching television mindlessly. We record every show we want to watch, or I watch on Hulu or Netflix, so we don't really do any channel-surfing just to have something on. I still feel like we watch a lot of TV, though, and I'd prefer to rein it in. The Kindle that my parents got me for Christmas works with our local library's e-book lending system, which should help; I've already read Born to Run and am most of the way through The Night Circus--for free! If I could read a book a week, I'd be hugely thrilled with myself. (I can't even imagine how Elizabeth read 180 books last year while raising two kids. Amazing.)

-5-

House projects. There are a bunch of things we'd like to get done around the house, from finally getting some furniture in our front room (right now it houses a random collection of Nate's larger toys) to replacing a leaky faucet to getting someone in to diagnose and fix the water stain on our kitchen ceiling to planting vegetables in the backyard. Furniture in the front room is the big one.

-6-

Care less what other people think. This is an ongoing struggle for me. I mean, obviously I want to be kind and considerate of other people, and hopefully they will, therefore, find me to be kind and considerate. But I don't want to fret over others' opinions of me, or make decisions for myself or my family that aren't right for us because I'm afraid of what someone might think. This is a toughie, honestly, and I've failed massively at it so far this year. I need a thicker skin, I think.

-7-

Blog more. Sometimes it's just a matter of getting something written and hitting "publish." Like now.

Thoughts on a Saturday, and a wonderful surprise

2012-01-07T21:41:00.000-05:00

I once heard of a woman who always took down her Christmas decorations on Christmas day. Christmas day! I was appalled when I heard it, although someone quickly explained something about a life tragedy occurring on or just after Christmas that, understandably, cast a pall over the season for her. Under those circumstances, perhaps I'd also want to pack away the cheer as soon as the presents were opened and the dinner dishes cleared.

In my house, it was rumored that it was bad luck to leave the decorations up after the new year. And even though I don't believe in luck, I'd think this ridiculous even if I did. The actual Christmas season, which, of course, pre-dates shopping malls and Santa Claus and stockings and twinkle lights, doesn't even start until Christmas day (well, Christmas Eve night). The Twelve Days are just over, and with Epiphany transferred from January sixth to this Sunday, and the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord bumped to Monday, we technically still have a couple of days of celebrating ahead of us.

I feel a bit ashamed, then, that I'm currently lamenting the continued presence of a fully-decorated tree in my family room, and of assorted adornments scattered through nearly every room of the house.

I hate putting away Christmas.

I feel obligated to leave everything in place through at least the last weekend of the liturgical season, but there's something shiny and new about January that almost always makes me want to shuffle everything red and green back into the closet as soon as possible and eradicate every stray pine needle from my hardwoods. There's the desire to get the task behind me, of course (why is it that decorations so enchanting to put in place are so tedious to put away?), but there's also an impulse to get things back to normal, to make space in my home and in my head to just breathe. Ordinary Time isn't so bad, it turns out.

* * * * *

Something out of the ordinary, though, was the sixty-plus-degree weather we enjoyed today. Such a glorious day positively required time spent outdoors, and we spent ours down by the river, feeding the ducks. (Well, the gulls and geese are more plentiful this time of year, but don't tell Nate that. "Feed ducks" is his refrain whenever he sees a bag of crackers.)

* * * * *

I know quite a few people who aren't comfortable with social media, with blogs, with people choosing to open their lives, to varying degrees, to complete strangers. I suppose I'm just the opposite. I've seen too much of the good that can come from these threads woven through cyberspace, beginning, for me, back when I was an anonymous blogger brokenhearted by infertility. That blog led me to my dearest friend, to her incredible parents, her amazing two brothers and three sisters, to other friends online who have prayed for me and supported me for years now. This blog, started two years later, led me to all the ladies from The Blathering, many of whom were my cheerleaders through pregnancy and a c-section and the sleep-deprived haze of Nate's first year before I ever even met them in person. When I have a parenting conundrum, I ask Twitter, and I know that friends across the country (and in Canada!) will chime in with their best advice.

Still, though, I'm humbled by the outpouring of support I've received over the last few days just by posting here in my little corner of the internet about a bad experience. In addition to the more than seventy comments across two posts (only two of which were negative, and I think we can all agree that a Catholic who says taking a child to Mass is "bad parenting" is simply a person who cannot be taken seriously), there have been phone calls from family members and college roommates and law school classmates, emails from friends far and near, and a note from Arwen that made me cry (in a good way) (and on stationary that Ashley designed!).

The most surprising thing, though, arrived on my front porch today.

The package was from an address in California, from a city I'd never heard of before. There was no name above the address, just a message that "Arwen thought you might like this."

It was an entire box full of brightly wrapped, be-ribboned presents, Crappy Day Presents, to be precise, to be opened whenever I'm having, well . . . a day like the ones I had this week.

Turns out that Rachel, a blogger from the other side of the country, read my story and sent a message to Arwen suggesting that I could use a Crappy Day package, and would she mind sharing my address? Rachel has gifted other bloggers, like Swistle, with Crappy Day Packages before, but I'd never heard of such a thing until Arwen explained it to me today. A box of presents to open whenever you're feeling blue! Has there ever been a more genius idea in the history of the world? Others might argue with me here, but on this day, to this girl, the Crappy Day Package feels like the best invention ever. And the fact that it came here, unexpectedly, from another mother who doesn't know me from Adam, just because I was having a hard time . . . . Well, it proves to me the power of this space where we dare to share our lives. There might be a lot of bad out there in cyberspace, but there's kindness and beauty, too.

I couldn't open one today, of course, because today the mere receipt of the Crappy Day Package made it a non-Crappy Day. But, oh, knowing that these little beauties are here, waiting for me when I need them, really and truly does make me feel loved.

All the kindness poured out on me this week reminds me that I'm loved, and that I'm not alone, and that there are amazing, generous, thoughtful people all around me. It reminds me that the good really and truly does outweigh the bad.

So thank you, Rachel. Thank you, everyone. It all means more than I can adequately say.

It gets worse

2012-01-05T11:04:00.002-05:00

Oh, y'all. Thank you so much for the kind and supportive emails, tweets, and comments. They mean so much to me.

Unfortunately, things today have gotten even worse.

I really did have to psych myself up to get to Mass this morning. I tried to do everything I could to make sure Nate would be as calm and quiet as possible: feed him a good breakfast (challenging, because often he'll just refuse to eat much of anything in the mornings), keep him away from any screen time before Mass, and get out the door with plenty of time. I blessed us both with holy water before we left, asking for special graces for good behavior, and on the drive over we prayed (well, I prayed) aloud, including praying for the woman whose unkind comments made yesterday so awful.

And Mass was fine! Good, even, with the exception of the moment walking back to our pew from Communion, when Nate full-on screeched. I made a beeline for the door, but he was quiet by the time we reached it (of course), so I hesitated for a moment to make sure he was really done and then went back to our pew. He was quiet for the post-communion prayer and the final blessing.

I even took it as a good sign that the gospel reading today was John's account of Jesus calling Nathanael to be a disciple.

I didn't see the woman from yesterday, and figured she had been one of a number of people attending with a new priest who was saying a votive Mass for his recently-deceased father. (It's actually a very touching story, which you can read here. The new priest had been a transitional deacon at the parish where I attend daily Mass, and the votive Mass was during the usual weekday Mass, resulting in a mix of jeans-clad daily Mass-goers and black-clad guests.)

I will freely admit that Nate was noisier during yesterday's Mass than he usually is. In fact, I took him out into the vestibule for the entire consecration and through the peace. I have no problem removing my child from Mass when it seems called for. The difficulty, though, as any mother of a young child can attest, is determining when a sudden cry or moment of chatter will disappear as quickly as it came on, in which case a retreat to the vestibule or cry room is counter-productive and actually more distracting. I mean, unless I'm going to spend the entire Mass outside the sanctuary, there will inevitably be some moments of noise that other worshippers will have to endure. It's a matter of discretion, and of balance, and there isn't a linear improvement in day-to-day behavior. It's unpredictable, and it's hard. Unless we want to flat-out exclude children from the Mass, though, it's inevitable.

I would expect that the pastor of this parish** would understand all of this. This parish is absolutely teeming with kids, and has both a preschool and a K-8 school. And so when the pastor pulled me aside after Mass this morning and began with the words, "I'd really like to encourage you," I honestly thought he was about to say something, you know, encouraging.

I was wrong. "I'd really like to encourage you to make use of the gathering space," he said instead, referring to the enormous hallway that surrounds the sanctuary on three sides. We used to sit out there all the time, and Nate sees it as an invitation to run around like a banshee. (Most kids do, it seems. On the rare occasion we've attended this parish on a Sunday, the "gathering space" is an absolute zoo.) He is so much better behaved inside the sanctuary, confined in a pew, that I eventually gave up on the gathering-space-cum-cry-room.

I just stared at him for a moment, stunned. I was actually stunned. I think my mouth might have dropped open. Was I actually hearing him right? I must have been, because he continued to explain that that's what the gathering space is for! And that he would make sure his microphone was on so that we could hear! And that when he was a little older, we could come back in!

When I finally composed myself enough to speak, the words that came out of my mouth were, "We won't be coming back." It's one thing to have a random layperson make an unkind comment about my two-year-old's behavior. But when the pastor of a parish is telling me to my face that he'd prefer that we sit at the back of the bus, so to speak, that's it. I'll find another parish for daily Mass.

He immediately jumped in that that wasn't the solution, and that it's just that he had complaints from "our visitors" yesterday (unkind lady, I assume), and that it can be distracting from what's supposed to be a prayerful and spiritual experience, and all I could hear is, "You're not good enough. Your child isn't good enough."

I couldn't say anything else. I didn't want to break down crying again. He finally said he'd pray for me (the charitable part of me will accept prayers from anyone who's offering; the uncharitable part wants to ask him if he'll Turn on his microphone! So I can hear it!), but then he just turned his back and walked away.

I just feel like it was all handled so badly, that if he really felt it was necessary to speak to me to "encourage me to use the gathering space," he at least could have (1) asked me to go somewhere more private to speak, instead of ambushing me by the greeting line, and (2) truly said something encouraging to me first, to soften the blow.

And now, I don't know what to do. David is furious and wants to go to the bishop. I'm unconvinced that it will do any good. Different parishes and pastors have different attitudes toward cry rooms and "children's liturgy" and nurseries and kids in Mass, and I have a feeling the bishop might just think it's okay that this particular parish relegates families with small children to the gigantic vestibule for Masses. I'm more inclined to speak to my own pastor, who sees Nate regularly and knows he's an energetic kid and sees all the efforts we make to improve his Mass behavior. I don't want my own pride to get in the way here if there's something that I really need to be doing differently, and maybe he has some genuinely constructive ideas.

Right now, though, I'm truly heartbroken. I started attending daily Mass last spring as a way to encourage better behavior on Sundays, even jokingly referring to it as "Mass Boot Camp," to family and friends. Since then, though, I've come to depend on the grace it offers me, even on the days when it's challenging.

What would you do? I honestly need some advice here. Just be kind, please. I'm feeling fragile.

(Posting this without proofreading, because I just can't look over it again without crying. Please forgive any typos.)

**Not our home parish, which only has daily Mass at seven a.m. Eight-thirty is enough of a feat, thank you very much.

A Memo

2012-01-04T21:30:00.000-05:00

TO: Myself, when I am old and my child is (children are?) long grown
FROM: Me, mother of a rambunctious two year old boy
DATE: January 4, 2012
RE: A Reminder
______________________________________________________________

I know that you're getting on in years now. Perhaps it doesn't feel like there's much to look forward to. Perhaps you have aches and pains that are getting the best of you. Perhaps you are lonely.

Perhaps you will still attend daily Mass sometimes. Perhaps your hearing isn't what it used to be. Perhaps it makes it difficult to concentrate.

Perhaps there will be a mother sitting in the back row, day after day, wrestling with her small child. He might be a chatty little thing, no matter how frequently and fervently his mother shushes him and how many times she retreats to the vestibule.

You might be tempted to say something to her. Not words of encouragement, mind you, but words of criticism. You might be tempted to admonish her that her child's joyful noise is a distraction, that she should take him away before he can disturb other worshippers. Before he can disturb you.

Should you feel so tempted, think back to this day, and remember how deeply a few unkind words can cut a mother struggling to rein in a toddler's exuberant energy. Recall how you worked, day after day, to get yourself and your child up and dressed and fed and to Mass on time. Remember the careful balancing of priorities with every service. (Nave or vestibule? He treats the vestibule like playtime; will he learn to calm down out here? How loud is too loud in the nave? Is carrying him out the bigger distraction? Will he settle down in just a second?) Consider how you always worried that the other Mass-goers were silently judging your parenting with every noise your child made, and how it felt when, in a matter of seconds, one old woman confirmed your fears.

Remember how the tears came, hot and stinging, as soon as you realized what she was saying. How you tried to keep yourself calm enough to eke out a feeble defense--we're doing the best we can--and to genuflect in front of the tabernacle before rushing out. How you choked on sobs as you buckled your little distraction into his car seat, while he looked up at you with confused eyes. Remember sitting in the driver's seat, unable to see through the tears, making desperate phone calls to anyone who might be home, anyone who might let you come over, anyone who would tell you you're a good mother.

Remember how you considered not going back tomorrow.

Remember how you had to steel your resolve that one unkind woman wasn't going to drive you away from the Eucharist, wasn't going to deprive your son of his Lord's very presence. Recall how you told yourself, over and over, that he's the Lord of the little ones, too.

"Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them. For to such belongs the kingdom of heaven."

Should you feel tempted to criticize, think back to today. Remember how you felt.

And bite your tongue.

On ice

2012-01-03T17:26:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure whether I've mentioned it here, but my son is currently obsessed--completely and totally smitten--with hockey.

It started innocently enough. We have a one-fourth share in two season tickets to the Washington Capitals, and the pre-season tickets are pretty much thrown in for free. We decided to take Nate to an afternoon pre-season game, figuring that if he was squirmy and fidgety and otherwise refused to sit in our laps, we could leave without being out anything. This is, after all, a kid who's not exactly known for his ability to sit still, and our expectations weren't too high.

He was mesmerized. He sat still; he was enthralled; he watched and clapped and generally had a terrific time. And he's talked of little else since.

We're in a bit of an odd position in our house; we like both the Washington Capitals and the Pittsburgh Penguins (who, incidentally, hate each other). David is from Pittsburgh and grew up a Pens fan, but he likes hockey enough to want to see it live on a regular basis--hence the season tickets. So in the time since the pre-season game, Nate has acquired roughly double the amount of hockey gear that the average two-year-old hockey fan might, including:

Three hockey jerseys (one regular Caps, one regular Pens, and a Pens Winter Classic)
One hockey net
Eight hockey sticks (six from my in-laws, one from the guy who has the season tickets next to us, and one from a colleague of David's)
Two hockey pucks (both from attending Caps practice)
Four pairs of hockey-themed socks (two Caps, two Pens)
Two Hot Wheels-sized zambonis (one Caps, one Pens)
A mini hockey player toy (Pens)
A soft toy puck (Pens)
An Alexander Ovechkin Christmas ornament

Um, I think that's it? Maybe?

(The Christmas ornament wasn't even supposed to be for Nate. I was in David's stocking, but Nate quickly co-opted it for himself and began carrying "Ovie" around everywhere.)

Now, lest you think that David and I are going crazy buying things over here, I should point out that, of all the items listed above, we purchased exactly one: the Caps jersey. I have an exceedingly generous mother in law who is as big a sports fan as her sons, and whose primary love language clearly is gift giving. Oh, and I guess we did buy him a Blu Ray of the movie "Miracle," after he kept demanding to watch the final locker room speech and final minutes of the movie over and over again on YouTube. He insists on watching "hockey movie" several times each week, usually while wearing one of his [three!] jerseys and swiping at a puck or ball with one of his [eight!] sticks.

Like I said, obsessed.

It was only natural, then, that David would want to let him try ice skating. He can't start formal lessons until he turns three, but the local ice complex has a "Recess at the Rink" specifically for kids aged 2-6 with little or no experience to stake with a parent. So we ended 2011 with something new.

He couldn't stay on his feet, but, man, did he love being out on the ice. Every time an exhausted David would try to bring Nate out of the rink, Nate would clamor back through the gate with cries of "more, more!"

I can see my future, and it involves five a.m. practices. God help me, people, I think I'm going to be a hockey mom.

It's Christmas Novena time again!

2011-11-30T11:15:00.001-05:00

First of all, I realize that I never said thank you for the kind comments and tweets and emails in response to my recent post about trying for another baby. I started blogging as a way to deal with the overwhelming emotions I'd had concerning our fertility issues, and it continues to mean so much to me to know that there are people out there--some we've met, some we haven't--who are rooting for us and praying for us.

And speaking of prayer, I wrote last year about the Christmas novena that Arwen prayed before Camilla was conceived, and that we prayed before Nate was conceived. Between us we're three for three with this novena leading to pregnancy, and even though my more recent pregnancy ended badly, I remain more convinced than ever of the efficacy of this incredibly powerful prayer.

I'm re-posting below what I wrote last year as we prepare to begin praying again. The novena starts today, the feast of Saint Andrew! If you're so inclined and want to pray along with us, I'd be ever so grateful if you'd add our intention to your own. I don't think it's any secret what we're praying for. And a special thanks to all of you who have already promised your prayers. Please know that you remain always in mine.

* * * * *

Two years ago, Arwen told me about a novena she'd prayed three years earlier. She had been trying to get pregnant for two years at that point (ironic, isn't it, that she'll have FOUR children next summer?), and she was turning to this special, powerful prayer.

I knew, of course, that she got pregnant with Camilla less than two months after the novena was done, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any doubts that it would "work" for us. I mean, I know that God answers every prayer, but I also know that the answer isn't always the one we'd hoped for. We'd been waiting over three years for a baby by then, and I had only one fallopian tube, and I was ten years older than she'd been when the novena worked for her, and . . . let's just say I was hopeful, but hesitant.

But pray we did. As did the rest of Arwen's family, and less than a month after Christmas we found out I was expecting Nate.

Needless to say, then, I'm a big believer in this novena. We'll be praying it again this year, starting on the feast of Saint Andrew. The prayer is recited fifteen times per day from November 30th through Christmas. It's a lovely prayer and very easy to memorize.

If you'd like to join in, make sure you choose a good intention. This is one powerful prayer!

Hail and blessed be the hour and moment
in which the Son of God was born of the Most pure Virgin Mary
at midnight in Bethlehem, in piercing cold.
In that hour, vouchsafe, o my God!
to hear my prayer and grant my desires,
through the merits of our Savior Jesus Christ
and of His Blessed Mother.
Amen.

Agape

2011-11-28T18:48:00.001-05:00

Nearly every time I fire up my laptop these days, Nate clamors into my lap, demanding "Picture! Picture!" (Actually, it sounds more like "Peecha! Peecha!") He wants me to open the Photo Booth application and take pictures of the two of us--or let him take pictures of himself.

Adorable, right? Except that in every single picture, he wants to open his mouth as wide as it will go.

Behold:

I'm sure it's just a phase, right?

The First Sunday of Advent

2011-11-27T20:38:00.001-05:00

Inspired by Emily and Elizabeth, David and I came up with a long list of activities with which to fill our Advent calendar. They range from very simple (set up Nate's Nativity sets, get out Christmas books, take canned goods to the food pantry) to potentially messy (decorate gingerbread houses, make pine cone and peanut butter ornaments for the birds) to big and event-y (Scottish walk parade in Old Town, ZooLights at the National Zoo, go see the National Christmas tree).

And then we neglected to complete an activity for the first day of Advent.

Now, to be fair, I haven't actually set up the Advent calendar yet. As any liturgical Christian knows, the length of Advent varies from year to year, depending on when Christmas falls. This year, Advent is as long as it ever is (28 days), because Christmas is on a Sunday. When Christmas is on a Monday, Advent is a mere 22 days long, because the Fourth Sunday of Advent is actually Christmas Eve. (I think it's a bummer when this happens, frankly.) Regardless of the actual length of Advent, though, every Advent calendar I've ever seen, including mine, starts on December first.

Clearly my out-of-the-gate Advent stumble is the fault of my calendar, and not any failing on my part. Ahem.

But we did manage to get the Advent wreath set up and blessed, and we lit the first candle tonight during dinner. I'd like to find a short, simple prayer to use when lighting the candles, because I'd like to do it every night while we eat and the prayers from the book I have (Prayers for the Domestic Church) are way too long for nightly use when your two year old is waiting for his food.

I also think I've settled into a Christmas-decorating plan that I'm really comfortable with. In 2008, in a well-intentioned but incompletely thought-out plan to observe Advent during Advent and celebrate Christmas during the actual Christmas season, we waited until the Fourth Sunday of Advent to procure a Christmas tree. And then we discovered that very few places are still selling trees that late and very nearly ended up tree-less. Even the Catholic school in Old Town was out of trees by the time we got around to buying one. It was a bad day, that one.

In 2009 we decorated on the earlier side. I think we put up the tree on the second weekend of Advent. Nate was two months old, and so we needed to take advantage of the one weekend my mom was in town to get everything done. Score one for necessity dictating the schedule.

Last year, though, I hit upon what I think is the right balance for us. I pulled out the non-tree decorations during the second weekend of Advent. They got the house feeling festive, but we still had the tree to look forward to. We got the tree, then, on the third weekend, which also happens to be the weekend of Gaudete Sunday--a nice time for a little rejoicing. I liked this for a few reasons. First, it was far enough into Advent that I didn't feel like we were completely getting ahead of ourselves. Second, it broke up the decorating so that it wasn't a big, all-day job. And third, it made the tree decorating into a fun, stand-alone event, one made all the more enjoyable because the rest of the house was already bedecked with trimmings.

So we're going with that plan again this year. At some point in the future, I may consider breaking it down even more: maybe buying and lighting the tree on the Third Sunday, but saving the ornaments until the Fourth. Or maybe I'll just ask Arwen what her family always did, and then shamelessly copy them, as per usual.

Not until Thanksgiving 2030, my friend

2011-11-26T15:44:00.001-05:00

We made it through Thanksgiving unscathed, even though Nate decided that Wednesday afternoon--which was slated for potato-mashing and pumpkin spice bread-baking and corn muffin-making and table-setting--would be the perfect day to refuse to take a nap. Ultimately, everything was delicious, and we managed to get it all served on time and get it almost all cleaned up well before bedtime, which is a huge win in my book.

I thought I'd been very clever in moving the little wooden play table and chairs into the dining room, so that Nate and our goddaughter, Fiona, could sit with us sans high chairs. Fiona is only six months older than Nate, and they get along pretty well, so it seemed like it would work. It did work, sort of, for Fiona, who is (1) slightly older, (2) a girl, and (3) used to being cooperative around other kids in her preschool. I know she at least ate some turkey. Nate had a fabulous time, apparently sustained by air and pure adrenaline, because he refused to eat a bite. He even turned his nose up at the might-as-well-have-been-pie-filling sweet potato casserole with praline topping. What kid turns down a side dish that is essentially comprised of sugar and butter? Mine, I suppose.

The highlight of the day, though, occurred as we all sat down to dinner. Fiona was settled at the little table with her plate, and David was bringing Nate's dinner from the kitchen into the dining room. He was also carrying his own beer glass, and he set both the plate and the glass on the kids' table so he could settle Nate into his chair. Fiona sized up the situation in an instant and, deeming it woefully inequitable, began wailing, "I want a beer like Nate! I want a beer like Nate!" as her parents rushed over to explain that my two-year-old wouldn't be washing his turkey down with a microbrew. She was so upset about it, and it felt kind of mean to be laughing at her distress. But seriously, how could we not laugh at our pint-sized goddaughter demanding her fair share of the booze?

All in good time, Fiona. All in good time.

T-minus three hours until my next shot

2011-11-19T17:04:00.001-05:00

Elizabeth called me out this week on not posting in over a month. I knew it had been a pathetically long time, and I had decided this week to bite the bullet and start posting about what's been going on, but I haven't really known how to go about doing it.

After I miscarried in the spring, my doctor told me that, given my age and history of infertility, I should come back in for fertility treatment if I wasn't pregnant again within 2-3 months. Considering how long it had taken to get pregnant with Nate, it seemed like a laughably short time frame in which to find myself pregnant, and it was. So by the end of the summer we were looking into starting fertility treatments.

The really crappy thing about having real difficulty getting pregnant is that it ends up being so damn exhausting. Everyone jokes about how much fun it is to try to have a baby. Throw caution to the wind! Have a few drinks! Take a romantic trip! And for people who get pregnant within a few months, I'm sure it's a great time. Part of the reason I had been so thrilled to see those two pink lines in March was that we hadn't been affirmatively"trying." I mean, we have never undertaken any measures to prevent pregnancy, so other than when I was pregnant and postpartum we were always, in a sense, trying to get pregnant. But I wasn't expecting it to happen, which made it all the more thrilling when it did.

If that pregnancy had stuck, it's likely we never would have worried about "trying" ever again. I could be wrong; maybe we'd always want just one more. But we both know how stressful it is, and how difficult it has proven for us, and so I really think we would have counted our blessings, prayed for another baby, and just let nature take its course.

It didn't stick, though, and instead it just threw into sharp relief just how much we wanted another one. It's weird, too, because in some ways I feel both more and less desperate about it. On the one hand, we have an amazing, adorable, enchanting child. We're parents, and that's something that's true whether we have one kid or a dozen.

On the other hand, though, I feel like it's important to have another baby for Nate. I don't want him to have to grow up as an only child. Obviously we'll do the best we can to make his childhood and his entire life as full of love and joy as possible, even if he never has a brother or sister. But I believe that siblings are the greatest gifts parents can give their children, and I just don't want him to be alone if we can help it.

So here we are, stuck with the stress of truly trying once again, and in August we found ourselves sitting in a consultation with the fertility doctor we'd seen five years ago, as if we'd stepped back in time. Instead of being in my fortieth week of pregnancy right now, where I wish like anything I were on this November evening, I'm instead blogging from the other side of updated hormone panels, a dozen or so blood draws and ultrasounds, pre-bedtime hormone injections in my stomach, and, as of a few days ago, two failed medicated cycles. Last night I started the injections for cycle number three.

I don't want this space to turn back into an infertility blog. I did the infertility blog thing when we were trying the first time, when I desperately needed that online community of women who were all dealing with the same thing. At the time, trying to have a baby was very nearly my sole focus. This time around, there's a rambunctious two year old who gets top billing in the attention department, which really does make all the difference in the world. It means walking into the fertility clinic for monitoring already experiencing the joy of motherhood, instead of just wishing for it. It doesn't mean, though, that I'm not sad or that I'm not stressed or that I don't need to be able to write about what's going on.

That's where I've been, and why I've been quiet. I just don't feel like being quiet about it any more.

Year gone by

2011-10-06T16:35:00.002-04:00

Last year on his birthday, I remember thinking Nate was so big, capable of so much, and looking back now at photos from his first birthday, I see that he was still a baby. Not any more. This walking, talking, iPad-wielding, headstrong little person is definitely a kid. A delightful, hilarious, whip-smart little kid.

I can't wait to see what the next year brings. Happy birthday, little man.

Music by Mindy Gledhill. The two photos from the Christmas tree lot were taken by Arwen and Miriel's talented brother, Brandon Thomas.

Accent Vlog

2011-10-03T08:38:00.003-04:00

A bunch of the ladies from The Blathering (less than three weeks away!!) have been posting Vlogs (video blogs) showing off our regional accents, or lack thereof. I actually recorded this last Friday, but neglected to post it all weekend. Better late than never! And at least there's a cute, albeit demanding, toddler, to distract from my inane ramblings.

Accent Vlog from Lauren Petron on Vimeo.

Watching this again, it's clear that: (1) Wow, I'm opinionated, and (2) I'm opinionated about things that don't matter in the slightest.

So what do you think? Accent or not? If you'd like to participate, you can find the words and questions here.

Reining him in

2011-09-24T15:46:00.005-04:00

Okay, I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I'm beginning to think that those oft-maligned kid leashes aren't such a bad idea.

I've been wondering about this for a while, actually. I've heard them described with disdain for years, and I'll admit I had a negative visceral reaction when I saw a child in one at the library a while back. In her column this month, the editor of Real Simple magazine pokes fun at the harnesses, reasoning that "not all ideas that can be easily explained are good ones; leashes for children come to mind.") As the mother of an almost-two-year-old boy who loves to run away from me at every opportunity, though, I now beg to differ.

Picture me running a quick errand with my toddler. I take him out of his car seat and head into, say, the pharmacy. I just need to pick up a prescription, so I don't want to pull out the stroller and strap him in--particularly because he generally hates being confined in the stroller. (And because the aisles of our old CVS are so narrow the stroller might not actually fit.) Instead, I either hold him or, preferably, hold his hand and walk with him through the drugstore to the pharmacy counter, where I must then dig one-handed in the diaper bag for my wallet, awkwardly wrestle my HSA debit card from its place in the credit-card lineup one-handed, and sign my name twice (once on the receipt, once on the prescription pick-up sheet) without letting go of Nate's hand to hold down the paper. If, at any point, I have to use my left hand, Nate takes off, oblivious to my pleas that he stay beside me.

In other words, I'm beginning to see the value in somehow tethering him to me.

I haven't done it, of course, because I'm the kind of person who cares far too much what other people think of me, and I don't know that I could deal with the stares that my leashed child would elicit. (Even if he were wearing one of those cutesy "I'm a cuddly animal backpack with a long handle" contraptions that fool no one.)

I'm wondering, though, how it is that the kid leash became so universally mocked. The obvious answer, of course, is that we use leashes for dogs, and so harnessing a child seems akin to treating him like an animal. And maybe that's right. But hear me out: No one thinks twice about seeing a toddler in a stroller. I mean, aside from some hard-core Montessori folks who would want a child restrained only when required by law or for obvious safety (e.g., in a car seat), or some hard-core babywearing types, like Maggie Gyllenhaal's character in Away We Go, people don't have a problem with pushing a small child around strapped into a seat. And neither do I. We have and use a stroller, whenever it makes sense and Nate will tolerate it.

But a child in one of those kid harnesses actually has more freedom to move and explore than a child in a stroller. He can stoop down to touch the grass. He can pick up sticks and leaves and acorns. He can turn around to look at anything he pleases, without his view blocked by a stroller seat. Honestly, there's a part of me that thinks Nate might prefer the toddler leash.

I'm hoping and praying this period of impressive mobility (seriously, people constantly comment on how fast he is) coupled with a tendency to wander, is short-lived. Nate is so good at following most instructions--throwing things in the trash, putting away toys, cleaning up spilled food--but his curiosity just gets the best of him when I need him to stay stationary in public. I'll probably just stick to putting him in the Ergo carrier when the stroller is impractical and I know I'll need both hands. But my hat's off to you, kid-leash inventor. Maybe it's not such a bad idea, after all.

The loss season

2011-09-21T13:50:00.005-04:00

For the longest time, I didn't think all that much about miscarrying. I mean, I thought about it all the time at first, obviously, but before too long it sort of faded into the background. Such are the benefits of already having a child to take care of; Nate takes up most of my energy, anyway, so there wasn't a lot of time to dwell on what we'd lost. (I shudder to think of the state I'd have been in if I'd lost my first baby, after waiting so long for him.)

Fall, though, as much as I love it, always seems to bring me a hearty dose of melancholy, and this year it's got an extra helping of wistfulness in tow. All of a sudden my friends who got found out they were expecting this spring, right around the time I did, are hugely pregnant and approaching their due dates. I still associate September due dates with my expectation that Nate would be born around September 22nd. October dates, too, make me think back to Nate's birth, since he stubbornly hung out in my womb long enough to flip the calendar page. It's November that's giving me pause.

By my calculations, the baby we lost would have been due on Thanksgiving day. When I initially calculated it, the timing seemed perfect--a day to thank God for all He's given us, and in particular this latest little blessing. When I miscarried in early April, I didn't think about the fall. I just needed to get through the pain of the now at that point, and some ever-hopeful and obviously naive part of myself thought it was entirely possible that I'd be pregnant again by my due date. (To be honest, that part of me is still hopping around inside, fingers crossed and eyes shining. My jaded side wants to kick her and have a margarita. Or three.)

It's officially fall, though, and as the magazines and catalogs and cooking blogs gear up with an onslaught of lovely autumnal decor and harvest-time food, my thoughts keep turning to what we should have been expecting this season.

I worry that it will color the rest of the year, which isn't fair to Nate, to David, or to myself. It isn't fair to my brother-in-law and his lovely wife, who are expecting their first, long-awaited child next month. (And honestly, my excitement over their baby is actually helping right now. Between shower-throwing and advice-giving and equipment-lending, it's like I still have a baby project, sans heartburn, backaches, and the immediate promise of sleep deprivation.) I'm praying the cure to my funk will come, at least in part, from planning plenty of activities to celebrate what really is my favorite season. There's an arts festival to attend, an anniversary and a birthday to celebrate (our sixth; Nate's second), a Halloween costume to plan, a girls' weekend to relish, a farm to visit, and probably a dozen other fall-centric activities I'm dying to drag Nate to this year. There'll soon be a tiny niece to snuggle and coo over. We'll be fine. But still.

My mother asked us to come down to Georgia for Thanksgiving, but I can't deal with the idea of spending my due date in the same place where we discovered my miscarriage. Not at all. Better to have my own Thanksgiving feast to focus on, at home, where I can make sure I'll be too busy with table setting and turkey roasting and potato mashing, hopefully, to dwell too much.

And, I promise, I'll still look around my table and smile with gratitude, even if there are tears in my eyes.

{Image credit: thealwaysgentleman.tumblr.com via Diana on Pinterest.}

Let's talk about my birthday! And my hair! Because those things TOTALLY go together.

2011-09-18T13:16:00.003-04:00

Today is my birthday. Yesterday I was feeling slightly angsty about the whole "another year older" thing, because these years, they are really piling up now, but today I've been refreshingly nonchalant about it. Perhaps it's because, as per usual on one's birthday, I woke up feeling exactly the same as I felt yesterday, and not suddenly all arthritic and possessed with a need to eat dinner at half past lunchtime. (Although, ironically, our dinner reservation tonight is at a positively geriatric FIVE PM. So maybe the joke's on me.)

I'm feeling particularly spunky because yesterday I had all of my hair cut EVEN SHORTER, of you can believe it, and can we discuss how happy my short hair makes me? I mean, on its best days I used to love my longer hair. If it wasn't raining, or windy, or humid--which is to say, practically never--and I worked hard at blow-drying it with a round brush, it looked pretty cute. I'd made peace with the fact that it won't lie straight or turn under at all, and so I did this sort of flippy-out thing and for quite a few years I kept it mostly the same out of deference to a growth pattern that baffles even the most unflappable stylist. But it took forever, and if there was even a whiff of moisture in the air I'd step outside and see my hard work demolished in a span of mere minutes. Y'all, I kept a combination round-brush-hair-dryer thingie in my desk at work, so that I could RE-flip the ends at the office on bad-weather days. It was a lot of effort, is what I'm saying.

And while I don't think my short hair is the most adorable or stylish thing ever (on ME, that is, because I see other women all the time who have short cuts that are positively darling), here's the thing: With my old haircut, the significant effort far outweighed the typically mediocre results. Now, I put in very little effort, and the results are consistently JUST FINE. And they're fine regardless of the relative humidity level, which is HUGE.

So, anyway. Short hair= win. And now even shorter hair=bigger win.

In other WIN news, David bought me two very lovely and delightful birthday presents:

This sweater that I really wanted from Garnet Hill.

And this dress from Boden that I am wearing AS I TYPE THESE VERY WORDS.

We are a "send me specific gift ideas" sort of family, which I dislike in some ways, but it does make it easy to get precisely what you want, so I'd send David links to both of these items. He called me from work the other day to tell me that the dress was backordered for, like, eight weeks, which made me COMPLETELY UNREASONABLY upset, as I'd had visions of this dress with a chunky necklace and boots and I needed to make my fall SAHM fashion dreams come true.

(Sidebar: Don't you hate it when you KNOW that you are having a completely unjustified emotional reaction to something very minor, and you STILL can't stop feeling the way you're feeling? This happens to me all the time, and it just adds insult to injury. I feel like if the intellectual side of my brain totally GETS that I'm being crazy, it should be able to whip the emotional side into shape. But no.)

But! David gave me a box to open this morning and it contained both the sweater AND the dress! And he keeps telling me that there are MORE presents to come, which makes me practically giddy. (I'm SPOILED SPOILED SPOILED and I totally know it, but gifts are totally one of my love languages and David loves to buy things for me, so this just really works for our relationship.)

Anyway, to sum everything up. Hair=short. Husband=generous. Birthdays=awesome. You=really glad this post is over.

Photo sources: garnethill.com and

bodenusa.com via laurenpetron on Pinterest

Preschool Dazed

2011-09-15T15:21:00.002-04:00

My son is not even two years old yet, and I'm fretting about school.

Perhaps it's indicative of my Type A personality, or perhaps it's just that we live where we live. (At the playground last summer, when Nate wasn't even one, I had other mothers asking me whether I was sending him to preschool that fall.) Regardless, it's taking up a fair bit of my mental energy right now, because I'm worried about, you know, getting it right. In preschool.

The first question, of course, is whether to send him at all next fall. Three is a pretty common age at which to start preschool, and Nate will, indeed, be three next fall. But the state age cutoff for starting kindergarten is five by September 30th, and so many of the preschools have a three-by-the-30th policy, and Nate's birthday is October 6th. Less than a week later. And so we're faced with the question of whether we'd rather he be pretty much the youngest kid in his class, or the oldest.

I'd initially hoped we could just postpone thinking about this issue until closer to age 5, when he has some preschool under his belt and we can see where he is intellectually, emotionally, and socially. I'd sort of figured that we could, if necessary or advisable, give him three years of preschool.

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems like we have to give this some serious thought right now. First, if we send him to a traditional preschool program, what is he going to think when all his classmates are going to kindergarten the following fall, and he's going to stay out for another year of preschool? Second, we're considering sending him to Montessori school, where the kids spend three years in the same Primary classroom, with the third year being the kindergarten year. If we go the Montessori route and start him next fall, we're pretty much making the decision now that he'll be the youngest kid in his class.

There is sort of another option, I guess, which is to put him in a twos or 2.5s program, although those programs are very popular around here and hard to get into.

If we do decide to send him next fall, assuming he can do a threes program, the next question is whether to send him to a play-based or a Montessori school. The Montessori schools, in addition to being crazy expensive, all seem to meet five days a week. Five days a week just seems like a lot to me, and there's not an option to attend for fewer days. At the same time, I love the Montessori philosophy and think he could really thrive in that environment (and, actually, that almost any child would thrive in that environment). We can figure out the money; if we decide it's the right fit for him, we'll just make it a priority. I just don't know whether either of us will be ready to be apart for hours every day.

(That's the other thing that's so frustrating. I'm thinking about these things an entire year ahead of time. But the preschool fair is next month, and applications are due in January and February, and the Montessori schools take applications on a rolling basis--i.e., now. And at $100 a pop just to apply, I feel like I don't want to send a bunch of applications willy-nilly in case we decide to go that route.)

The third issue is whether we want to send him to our parish preschool. The parish just opened a preschool this fall, and I'd initially assumed we would just send him there. There's a Montessori-based religious education program involved (Catechesis of the Good Shepherd), but the bulk of the program is not Montessori. I feel like, unless we decide to send him to a true Montessori school, we should support the parish school, and I've always loved the idea of having more areas of our life be tied into our faith community. They are using the September 30th birthday cutoff, but I'm pretty sure that if their threes program isn't full next fall, they'd be glad to take Nate.

Of course, the biggest problem with all of this is that it forces me to consider the fact that my precious tiny baby is continuing to get bigger and bigger and all too soon will be in school, all day, away from me, and will one day leave me altogether. This, my friends, is wholly unacceptable. And unavoidable. With my boy at age not-even-quite-two, I'm not ready to think about it yet.

Maybe I can just scrap the whole "going to school" idea and homeschool him until college.

The first goodbye

2011-07-06T20:40:00.002-04:00

Nate is twenty-one months old today, and as of about a week ago, he's officially weaned. If you'd told me just after he was born that he would nurse until he was over twenty months old, the thing I'd find most surprising was that my body finally managed to do something right. With over three years of trying to conceive behind me; with a body that refused to go into labor even two weeks past Nate's due date; with a Caesarean section instead of the natural birth we'd prepared for; with milk that refused to come in until day five, Nate dropping over a pound before we'd left the hospital, and the lactation consultant stopping by to give me the dreaded talk on supplementing . . . with all of that, there was a time when I doubted my body would do any of the things I'd so hoped for with respect to having children.

We were discharged from the hospital on the Friday evening after Nate's birth, with a pediatrician's appointment already scheduled for the next morning to check his weight. The first night at home was awful, mind-numbingly awful, as I cried in pain and David tried to thread a cruelly pointy feeding syringe between my cracked nipples and Nate's hungry mouth. Nate threw up blood in his bassinet, and we had a moment of panic as we debated whether to call the doctor. (Turns out that blood in spit-up is nothing to worry about with a newly-breastfeeding baby. It's, you know, mom's blood from her shredded-to-bits boobs. In a formula-fed baby, the books told us, blood in the spit-up is a call-the-doctor-immediately situation.)

And then, miraculously, my flailing body started to do something right. At the doctor's office the next morning, they weighed Nate before and after I nursed him. His five-ounce weight gain in the span of 25 minutes confirmed what I'd already gathered from looking in the mirror that morning: My milk had come in. Supplementing was suspended (praise God and pass the Lansinoh), and we were off to the races.

For the first several months, nursing Nate was the hardest thing I'd ever done. I couldn't get more than a couple hours of sleep at a time, and I couldn't ever get any time to myself. I quickly figured out that the hand pump I'd chosen was not going to cut it, and I upgraded to an electric one. That pump saved my sanity after a few months, when I finally got the timing down and David could take a night feeding for me. I think next time (please, God, send us a next time), I'll start pumping early and often for the sake of my mental health.

Once the pain stopped, though, and--much later--once Nate stared sleeping, nursing him got, well, easy. And so we kept at it. I was determined, I needed, to make it to that magical one-year mark. And when a year came and went, even when certain family members wondered aloud how long I was going to "keep doing that," we just kept at it some more.

I think I'd have weaned him earlier if I'd been more confident that we'd ever have another child. Given my track record, though, I was reluctant to let go of this part of Nate's babyhood. And so we made it this far, farther than I ever thought we would. For a few days I kept offering just one more feeding, one more time, until I just didn't any more. Now he's stopped asking. It's over, this part of mothering my baby, who in so many ways isn't a baby anymore.

I know it's not the hardest goodbye I'll say to my firstborn, but it's the first one, and that's hard enough for now.

A note sent too late

2011-06-22T12:23:00.003-04:00

Source: flickr.com via Margie on Pinterest

I just received an email letting me know that a professor at my law school, Anne Dupre, died early this morning. She had been battling cancer for many months, and I'd found out about it from another instructor back in January.

My sister and I had made the drive to Athens during one of my visits home, and I was excited to stop by the law school when classes were in session. We poked our heads into the courtroom where the moot court and mock trial teams practice, and my old moot court coach was working with one of her current teams. After we caught up for a bit, I told her that I wanted to make sure to stop by to see Professor Dupre; did she know whether she was around today?

Haven't you heard?, my coach asked, knowing that Professor Dupre had been my favorite, and she went on to tell me what she knew about the diagnosis, the surgery that revealed the massive extent of the cancer, the aggressive chemo. I determined that I should write her a note, and I stopped by her secretary's office to get the address.

* * * * *

Professor Dupre had been my contracts professor during my first year, where she regularly scared our newbie-law-student pants off. She was always meticulously prepared, and she expected us to be equal to her careful Socratic questioning. Her class, though exceedingly difficult, quickly became my favorite, and I wasn't alone in appreciating her care for and her challenge to her students. She knew what we were capable of, and she demanded--and obtained--excellence.

The summer after my first year, she hired me as her research assistant and began pushing me to apply to serve as a federal law clerk after graduation. Although we were confident that my grades would land me a spot somewhere, we weren't sure whether I'd end up at the trial court or the more prestigious appellate court level. But I applied for both, with Professor Dupre as a reference, and when a federal appellate court judge in Florida expressed interest, Professor Dupre made it her mission to get me hired. This judge had never once hired a University of Georgia graduate, but my dear professor spent more than an hour on the phone with her, convincing her that I was worth taking a risk on. (It didn't hurt that Professor Dupre knew personally the quality of a Georgia grad; she herself had graduated first in her class from UGA's law school, had clerked for the court on which this judge sat, and had gone on to clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Professor Dupre could be exceedingly persuasive, and I got the job, a job that would change my life forever. Nearly any clerk will tell you that her clerkship was the best job she ever had, but mine was especially significant; the man who would become my husband was one of my fellow clerks. There's a toddler sitting next to me who quite literally would not exist but for Professor Dupre's persistence on my behalf.

Professor Dupre wasn't just a scholar who happened to teach classes, although she was certainly a first-rate legal scholar. She was a passionate educator who always put her students first. Her undergraduate background was in education, and she had a passion for issues involving education and the law and children and the law. Her education law seminar was, by far, my most interesting law school class.

Professor Dupre left her mark on hundreds, if not thousands, of students, and I count myself fortunate to be among them. It seems fitting that she died on the feast of Saint Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers, because she inspired in her students the same determination to stand for what is right, regardless of the cost.

* * * * *

I never did send that note. Professor Dupre's address sat in my purse for months as a reminder that I should put pen to paper, but I could never bring myself to draft a letter that felt like it would say, Sorry you're dying, but I wanted to let you know how you changed my life.

And so today I'm feeling like a monumental jerk. I should have put my own discomfort aside and let this tremendously influential woman know the extent of her influence on me. And it's too little, too late, but nevertheless:

Professor Dupre, you were an incredible teacher and an inspiring woman. You made me believe in myself, because you believed in me. My life is forever changed because you took a chance on me, and I will always be grateful.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon her. May she rest in peace.

I don't really have bad taste. I just don't know what to do.

2011-06-14T15:37:00.006-04:00

It's hard to believe it, but we've lived in our "new" house for a year this month. This time last year, we were up to our ears in boxes and wondering how Nate would handle the transition. This year, we can hardly remember what it felt like to live in the old place. This house is just home.

Home, though, with two wholly-undecorated and nearly empty rooms. And while it's nice to have so much space in this house that we're not packed to the gills, one of the rooms in question is, unfortunately, the front entryway.* That's right, the first thing everyone sees upon entering our house is an embarrassing assortment of three unrelated furniture pieces that don't even look like they belong in the entryway.

Glass-and-iron console table from David's bachelor days. Round side table from my grandparents' house. Black pull-down desk from my parents. This shot is taken from the doorway.

The bones of the entryway are gorgeous. It has big windows and plantation shutters and lovely wainscoting. I love the light fixture. I love the floor. So that's all really good.

The previous owners had a bench at that back wall, which might be a good idea for us.

The previous owners have a very traditional decorating style, and they had a bench, an antique standing desk, and a big dresser-as-console-table in the entry, plus one other piece I can't remember. It's a big enough space that it really does need several items, but they all have to make sense just being up against the walls, so as not to block the pathway.

They also had very distinctive red Asian-themed toile wallpaper above the wainscoting. I love it, but concede that it doesn't coordinate with our style at all. David hates it with the firey passion of a thousand suns.

Taken from the opening that leads to the dining room. We MUST get a rug in here, because it is currently an echo chamber. Oh, how I hate the mod glass table and red lamp in this space.

So here's what we need to do: We need to rip out the wallpaper and paint the top half of the walls. We need to find some sort of rug that will work in a long-ish, heavily-trafficked space. And we need to figure out what sort of furniture to put in there.

That opening to the right of the front door is a French door that also goes into the dining room. I think this entryway used to be a porch, and that was the door that led into the house.

Any suggestions? I'm kind of at a loss.

*We lovingly refer to the other empty room as "the red room," for two reasons. First (and most obviously), it's painted red. But second, we don't really know how to classify it. It used to be the dining room, before the previous owners added an addition to the back of the house. After the addition, they started using what had once been the living room as their formal dining room, and they turned the much smaller former dining room into a little sitting room, with a loveseat and a couple of chairs. For now, it's Miriel's yoga studio.

Seven Quick Takes

2011-06-03T20:50:00.002-04:00

- 1 -

Last week, I had a crisis of fashion and decided that I hated almost all of my casual summer clothes. I have lots of things I like for church or a dinner out in the summer--white pants with bright tops are my go-to for date nights, and I have plenty of lightweight dresses and skirts for church. I'm the opposite in winter; I have tons of casual jeans-and-a-sweater-and-boots options, but I'm at a loss when it comes to dressing up.

Hallie at Betty Beguiles recently began offering personal shopping services, and so I decided to go for it. I told her that I was interested in cute, SAHM-friendly everyday outfits that would work in our DC heat and humidity. And boy, did she deliver. She put together seven complete looks for me, along with links to purchase each item. And the outfits are adorable. You can see a few of them here. I'm going to be doing some major internet shopping this weekend.

- 2 -

I received an invitation to attend a casual dinner for a few alumni from my university, as well as some current students who are interning in DC for the summer. The honors program coordinator who is organizing the dinner made a point of saying she thought the students would be particularly interested in my work with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I felt obliged to tell her that, although I'd be delighted to attend, I was no longer working on the Hill, and that I'd been "just" a stay-at-home mom for a couple of years now. And after I hit Send I was honestly afraid that she'd respond with a "thanks, but no thanks," and rescind the invitation. Thankfully, she didn't, but it was one of the first times I've felt like I might be a disappointment because I've chosen to forgo an interesting and desirable career for motherhood. I know the only people's opinions that really matter here are (1) mine, (2) David's, and (3) Nate's, but it's still hard sometimes in a city like this to be off the career track.

- 3 -

For the first time in--well, ever--I completely cleaned out my Google reader. David convinced me to download feedly onto my iPad, which somehow makes it easier for me to flip through posts quickly. Between that and the Google Reader "Next" button that Manda just talked about, I think I may finally stay on top of my feeds!

- 4 -

Our pool might be able to re-open in a couple of weeks! It looks like the county is very supportive of allowing them to open with temporary measures--like a trailer for the men's locker room--in place. Summer is saved!

- 5 -

We might have just lucked into a beach vacation for later in the summer. Some good friends of ours--our goddaughter's parents--mentioned that they are renting a house in the Outer Banks for a week in August. When I asked who they were going with, they said, "No one. Unless you want to come." We've been talking about taking Nate to the beach at least for a weekend this summer, and it would be wonderful to vacation with these friends. We need to look at the dates and discuss whether we think Nate could do a long-ish car trip, but I think we're going to go for it!

- 6 -

Speaking of trips, I've told David that, if I'm not pregnant again by vacation time next year, I want my consolation prize to be a trip to the Napa Valley. And I want to stay here. Obviously, I desperately hope we end up with a baby instead of a wine-tasting vacation, but it's sort of nice to have something to look forward to in case Plan A doesn't work out, right?

- 7 -

I need a new TV series to watch on Netflix instant. I've gone through Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Damages, and Downton Abbey. Any suggestions?

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Summer plans, up in flames. (Literally.)

2011-06-01T15:13:00.004-04:00

Taking Nate to the pool regularly was probably the single activity I was most looking forward to this summer. I mentioned in my last post that we'd bought a membership to a local pool, and that this was the only pool I found that was open during the week throughout June (instead of a weekends-only schedule until the public schools let out), and the only pool that opened early enough to take Nate before his afternoon nap.

David and I took Nate for the first time last Saturday, and it was wonderful. We hit the baby pool around 10:15 or so, then got in the main pool from the time it opened at 11:00 until the mandatory kids' rest time at 11:45, when we headed home for lunch. Nate loved it, we loved it, and I left patting myself on the back for finding the perfect solution for us.

And then, on Monday morning, I opened my inbox to find a message titled, "LHP closed until further notice." There was a fire in the building that houses the locker rooms, lifeguard room, and snack bar, and it took out half of the building and the electrical system for the entire property. Thankfully, it occurred in the middle of the night, and no one was hurt. You can see photos of the damage on the pool's facebook page.

And that's it. They don't know how long it will take to rebuild, or replace the electrical system, or get the pool up and running. It will likely be closed for the entire summer. And, y'all, I know this is such a freakin' first-world problem to have; woe is me, I can't take my toddler swimming whenever I'd like. But it's already in the mid-90s and humid this week, which severely limits our outdoor activity options. I lasted about 20 or 25 minutes at the playground yesterday morning, at 9:30 a.m. And all Nate wants is to go outside. He loves it.

I'm just really, really disappointed. Maybe it's stupid, but there it is.

I bought a twelve-dollar baby pool yesterday. It's not the same. It's not the same at all.

Catching Up

2011-05-01T14:40:00.002-04:00

First of all, thank you all so very, very much for your kind comments, emails, notes, and prayers on our behalf. We're doing fine, and I can't believe it's only been a month since I realized I was miscarrying. David was out of town on business for basically three out of the last four weeks, which meant that I pretty much had to put my head down and power through.

Nate's been particularly affected by his absence. When he was gone for most of two weeks in a row, Nate was inconsolable by the end of the second week, touchy and sensitive in a way that's not like him at all. He'd wake up crying from his naps and be moody all afternoon, and in my frustration it only occurred to me on the day he was getting home that he was probably missing David. Mom fail.

We have a security system in our house that makes a noise whenever one of the outside doors is opened. Nate has figured out that the noise means David and Miriel are home, and he now, when he hears it, he runs over to the door at the top of the basement stairs to wait for them to come up. One day this week he dashed over excitedly, saying "Papa, Papa, Papa," and my heart broke a little bit, knowing that David wouldn't be opening the door. And poor Miriel; he usually adores her, but that day he only wanted to push past her and scramble down the stairs, not believing us as we told him that Papa wasn't down there. It was a sad moment.

In the meantime, though, there's been a lot going on. Nate started taking "swim lessons," which I'm sure aren't helping him learn how to swim at all, but he loves getting in the pool with me at the rec center and moving around in the water, clutching the rubber ducky that the instructor hands out to each of the kids. In fact, he likes it so much (and I like his subsequent three-hour naps so much) that we bought a membership to a local pool for the summer. I'm a little annoyed that we can't just go to the much closer and much cheaper city pool near our house, but the city pool (1) doesn't open at all on weekdays until the end of June, after school lets out, and (2) even then, doesn't open until noon each day, which precludes any chance at a long-nap-inducing-pre-nap swim.

Someone sold us their membership, which is terrific. Apparently it's standard practice for families to sell memberships to other families, which is odd because there's a long waiting list for memberships. I can't figure out why anyone would sign up for the waiting list instead of just buying from someone directly, although I guess a lot of folks don't know about this practice. I'm on a couple of neighborhood listservs, and I'd seen this happening all last summer and all this spring. So when we decided to buy, I just posted an email to the listserv saying that I was looking for a membership, and someone contacted me wanting to sell her family's. Easy.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that something far less exciting and far more annoying happened this week: Our air conditioner died. Our house is a 1941 Cape Cod, but it has a huge, three-level addition on the back, so it has one unit for the older part of the house and one for the addition. The unit that cooled the older part of the house was from 1991, and, frankly, I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did. It was going to cost well over $1000 to try to fix it, and at twenty years old, it just seemed to make more sense to replace it. But I spent several days this week sweating and trying to vain to rid my furniture of the thick layer of pollen that had settled on everything through the wide-open windows. Of course, of course, it has been cool ever since the new unit was installed, but I'm still grateful that this happened in April instead of August.

Most exciting of all, my sister-in-law has finally gone public with her pregnancy! I am so, so thrilled that Nate is going to have a little cousin, especially one who lives right here in the same town. I'm gearing up to throw Maureen the most fantastic baby shower ever late this summer, so tell me, what was your favorite thing about your shower, or about a shower you've attended? Anything I should make sure I avoid (other than that disgusting melted-chocolate-bar-in-the-diaper game, which, just, gross)?

Hello and Goodbye

2011-04-04T11:42:00.004-04:00

We found out that I was pregnant on a Friday. It had been the most beautiful day of the year to date, and we'd celebrated by taking Nate to dinner at an outdoor cafe. I'd had a glass of wine, and was feeling sufficiently satisfied about it that I'd resolved to have another after I put Nate to bed.

As I rocked him in the fading light, though, I realized that it was theoretically possible that I could be pregnant. I say theoretically, because when you've been married for five-and-a-half years without ever doing anything to avoid pregnancy--have, in fact, actively pursued it for most of those years--and have only once seen two lines on a pregnancy test . . . well, you start to doubt that sex actually causes babies.

But I had two home pregnancy tests left from a three-pack I'd bought in a fit of wishful thinking last fall, and in the grand tradition of Better Safe than Sorry, I took one before indulging in glass number two. And I squinted in confusion at the second test window as a faint pink line appeared. I carried the test downstairs and presented it to an equally flabbergasted David, and we proceeded to examine the white plastic stick under every bright light in the house.

The digital test I took the next morning in the Target bathroom, too impatient to even leave the store, was far more definitive. Pregnant, it declared boldly. And somehow I began to feel equally bold. Ha!, I thought. Maybe all of those people were right, the ones who tell stories of women they know who try for years to get pregnant the first time, and then end up with two under two, or four under five, and hey, maybe we really would be able to have a big family after all.

I started looking at double strollers. We took measurements in our smallest bedroom to see whether we should use it as the nursery and retain our upstairs guest room. We laughingly lamented the difficulties of life with multiple children: How in the world will I grocery shop with two, honey? The cart only has one seat! Or, whispered during Mass while wrestling with an exceedingly active eighteen month old, How will we ever handle it when the next one gets here?

And it was all laughingly, of course, because this is exactly what we'd prayed for. To think that the Christmas novena had borne fruit in such short order, and not once, but twice.

And it did. I don't want to diminish that.

* * * * *

". . . the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Job 1:21 RSV
* * * * *

When I started spotting a tiny bit last Wednesday, so lightly that I wondered whether it was in my imagination, I tried not to think anything of it. Common, I told myself, Completely normal. I called my doctor's office, only because we were flying to Georgia the next morning for my sister's wedding.

"The doctor says she can refer you for a sonogram this afternoon if you're really concerned," the nurse relayed, her emphasis clearly trying to nudge me away from accepting the offer. I told her I was afraid, at not even six weeks by my calculations, that we might not see a heartbeat on ultrasound because it was simply too early. Think of all the worrying that would cause, I said, and then everything would probably turn out to be perfectly fine. No, better to wait for the appointment I'd already had scheduled for today. The nurse actually sounded relieved, it seemed, at my thinking, and I congratulated myself for being so sensible.

But when the spotting started again Friday afternoon, I knew--I knew--that I would miscarry. I'd known I was pregnant for two weeks by then, but I hadn't started to have any of the symptoms that I'd had with Nate. No ravenous hunger, followed by frustrating food aversions. No nausea. No overwhelming fatigue. No breast tenderness. And even though I'd tried to tell myself it was just too early, I think somehow I'd known all along.

That didn't make it any easier, though, when the spotting turned to bleeding in the middle of my sister's rehearsal dinner. It didn't stop the sobs from wracking my body or the tears from staining David's shirt later that night or the next morning when the cramping began. It didn't assuage my guilt when I made my husband tell my parents that they'd lost a grandchild, on a day when their only thought should have been happiness at gaining a son. It didn't make it a simple thing to stand in front of the wedding guests atop a lakeside dock on a glorious spring day, beside the beautiful bride in flowing white, and read Saint Paul's words about love: how it always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. It didn't make me feel less ashamed to leave my own sister's wedding reception when I knew that the cramping wouldn't let me make polite conversation through dinner.

There'd been too much blood--far, far too much blood--for me to hold out hope that I was wrong as we drove the many miles out for my appointment today, and as the kind doctor examined me, she told us what we already knew. This never-ending bleeding, yes, this is what an early miscarriage looks like. Early enough that it should resolve itself with no need for outside help, so there's that, at least.

* * * * *
I can say it certain now: All is grace.
I see through the woods of the world: God is always good and I am always loved.
God is always good and I am always loved.
Everything is eucharisteo.
Because eucharisteo is how Jesus, at the Last Supper, showed us how to transfigure all things--take the pain that is given, give thanks for it, and transform it into a joy that fulfills all emptiness. I have glimpsed it: This, the hard eucharisteo. The hard discipline to lean into the ugly and whisper thanks to transfigure it into beauty. The hard discipline to give thanks for all things at all times because He is all good. The hard discipline to number the griefs as grace because as the surgeon would cut open my son's finger to heal him, so God chooses to cut into my ungrateful heart to make me whole.
All is grace only because all can transfigure.

Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, pages 100-01

* * * * *

A good friend sent me a message in reply to my news: "I know it can't feel like it today, but God is still in control and loves you very much." She was right, and she was wrong. God is in control, and He does love me, but, strangely, today isn't a day in which my heart doubts it. I know there are those who rail at God when tragedies strike, and were worse fortune to befall me, I can't swear that I wouldn't be among them. It is grace, all grace, that instead today I feel strangely lifted up, keenly aware that He has me in the palm of His hand. I feel swept along in some current headed I know not where, but I trust that I'll arrive safely wherever it is that He intends to take me.

We went to Mass last night at a different parish, having taken an early flight home and having missed the morning services. I've always found this other parish sort of ugly. It's spare, modern, with glaring white walls and pews set at odd angles surrounding the altar. But what it does have is a massive, larger-than-life crucifix set high, Christ's suffering so big and bold that one can't ignore it. All through Mass and sitting for many minutes afterward I lifted my eyes to look upon our Lord's agony and felt, somehow, grateful to share His suffering in some small, so small way.

"Things will get more . . . intense . . . until the baby's remains pass," the on-call doctor told me this weekend. The baby. I am grateful to have doctors who share my view that life, no matter how fleeting, is a precious gift. A baby came into my life and left too soon, and still I'm feeling such a peace through the sadness. Is that this tiny person's gift to me? I can't say for sure. For now, though, I will try to look for the gift in the sorrow.

It's not the Lenten journey I anticipated. But I know, I know, the joy of Easter will still come.

Entering the Desert

2011-03-03T14:21:00.003-05:00

Lent is starting so very, very late this year. It feels strange that it's March already, and we're still in Ordinary Time. Less than a week to go, though, until Ash Wednesday, and so Lenten observances are on my mind.

I read Kate Wicker's terrific "Resources for Lent" post yesterday, which has me inspired. My Lenten sacrifices were paltry in 2009 and 2010; to be honest, I can't even remember what I did. I was in my first and early second trimester in 2009 and still dealing with a young and stubbornly sleepless baby in 2010, and taking on anything significant seemed like more than I could handle. And perhaps it really was, especially last year, but as a result, my experience of the Triduum and of Easter Sunday was less intense than it has been in the past. The Church in her wisdom knows that we need the time in the desert first, and I'm determined to embrace it this year.

One of the observances Kate mentions comes via Rachel Balducci--she discusses writing personal, handwritten notes to family and friends throughout Lent. This is such a beautiful idea, and one that I plan to adopt. I'll admit that I hope it might have the added benefit of resulting in some return notes, too. Often when I collect our mail, I'll notice a small, hand-addressed card or letter, only to have my initial rush of excitement crushed as I see that it's for Miriel, who is the queen of the letter. She keeps telling me you have to send good mail to get good mail; well, we'll see! (Would you like to get a note from me? E-mail your address, or DM me on Twitter.)

We've also been discussing foregoing takeout food throughout Lent. We are fortunate in that we don't have a strict food budget, but it makes it all to easy for me to turn to takeout on the frequent evenings when I'd rather not cook. Nate has been getting a little better about letting me cook dinner, as long as I bribe him with an episode of Sesame Street or Blue's Clues, but that seems a small price to pay for getting a home-cooked meal on the table. I'm not planning on being strict about what I prepare--sandwiches are fine if I don't feel up to cooking--but I'd like to transform takeout from a crutch into a special treat. (I'm not planning on giving up going out to restaurants, which is something David and I enjoy doing for date night or that we occasionally do as a family.)

Our yard is currently littered with twigs and small branches, thanks to some particularly windy days lately, and I'm planning on bringing some of them inside and arranging them in some way on our kitchen table as a visual reminder of the season.

In addition to making time for reciting morning and evening prayer, I'd like to undertake some sort of spiritual reading. For as many books as we own, and for a religion major who at one time planned on attending seminary (this was pre-conversion, obviously), I do embarrassingly little spiritual reading. As in, none to speak of. I've never even read Mere Christianity. Or Orthodoxy. I just ordered One Thousand Gifts, which has a promotional trailer so lovely that I couldn't resist buying the book (seriously, I dare you to watch it and not end up teary-eyed--it's SO worth the five minutes of your life). I feel like I need something more traditional, though. Any recommendations?

I'm also trying to figure out how best to support the spring 40 Days for Life campaign. Nate and I went to pray in front of the local abortion clinics a couple of times during the fall campaign, but it's a pretty difficult thing to do with a toddler. (It was difficult enough in the fall before Nate could walk.) The clinics are in the same office park along a very busy street, and there's no way to take Nate without holding him for the entire time. He is a notorious stroller-hater, and he's all about exploring right now--something he can't do with cars whizzing by. Maybe I can see if one of the other women in my parish moms' group wants to participate and switch off babysitting. Otherwise, it might just be frequently reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries at home.

That's all I have for now. I'd like to do some other, non-serious things, like making homemade pretzels and hot cross buns. I'd like to re-watch The Passion of the Christ, which I haven't been able to face again since I first saw it in the theater, during Holy Week. I'd like to spend less of Nate's naptime online and watching TV, and more of it reading, praying, cooking, or taking care of the house.

What are your plans for a fruitful Lent?

This post is almost as long as the trip was

2011-02-14T07:37:00.012-05:00

We survived The Mouse. And lo, it was exhausting, and also wonderful, and there is just SO much to say about it. My worst fears came to fruition (namely, Nate sleeping poorly, fighting the stroller, and melting down at restaurants), and somehow we still had a wonderful time. Such is the power of Magic, I suppose.  I've been putting off writing about it because I feel like there's almost too much to say. I know how much I appreciated being able to read other bloggers' accounts of their Disney trips with toddlers (hi, A'Dell and Maggie!), so I feel I owe it to The Internet to add to the collective knowledge.   

1. Where We Stayed

  We decided to ante up for a one-bedroom villa at the Bay Lake Tower at the Contemporary Resort. I'm really, really glad we went with the BLT. It's technically a Disney Vacation Club property, but, unless it's all booked up with DVC members, you can book a villa there just like you'd book any room at a Disney resort.   

We were so happy to have the two separate rooms when Nate was napping and when he went to bed, although we did end up napping a fair amount ourselves in the afternoons. (More about that below.) We made breakfast in the room every day that we didn't have a character breakfast scheduled, and I actually did a load of laundry in the in-room washer and dryer.   

I only had two complaints about the resort. First, one of the advertised amenities at the BLT is a rooftop deck overlooking the Magic Kingdom, from which guests can view the nightly fireworks. We tried in vain to find our way up to the deck only to be told later that it is only available to DVC members. That was a little disappointing, but not really a big deal; you can still watch the fireworks from a big balcony on the side of the original Contemporary Resort (complete with the music piped in from the Magic Kingdom).  

The bigger problem was that the room lacked wi-fi internet access. I'd planned to spend Nate's naptime streaming shows on Netflix and Hulu, and was sorely disappointed when we had no wireless signal in the condo. I don't even mind paying for wi-fi; just make it available. The front desk folks told us that wireless is only available in the public areas of the Contemporary Resort--and even then, only for a daily fee. (Although I don't mind paying for wi-fi in my room, I decidedly do mind paying for service I can only access in the lobby.) Surprisingly, I just looked at the "Amenities and Services" page on the BLT's website, and it lists Wi-Fi under "Room Amenities"--call me crazy, but I think that implies that wi-fi is available in the room.  

Clearly, I was pretty bitter about my inability to web surf on vacation. The only upside was that it kind of forced me to nap while Nate napped, which I probably needed.

  2. Getting Around  

Our resort was on the monorail line, which made getting to the Magic Kingdom and Epcot a breeze. Bus service was available to the Animal Kingdom and Disney Hollywood Studios, but the buses always took a lot longer to arrive than did the monorail (understandably). Getting to Epcot takes a little longer because you have to change monorails; the Magic Kingdom didn't require a switch.  

The monorails and buses were never crowded for us; we could almost always sit down, and we never had to fold up our stroller on the monorail. I imagine that during peak season, though, the transportation gets pretty claustrophobic. It would also be really annoying to miss a bus or monorail because it was full.  

The thing to remember is that, even staying on property--even staying on a monorail-line resort--getting around takes a while. The monorail goes in a big loop, and if you only have to ride one stop headed to the park, you'll have to pass every other stop on your way back to your resort. Still, it was far, far easier not to have to deal with renting and parking a car . . .  

. . . Except that I really hated the transportation to and from the airport. This was probably just an issue with our particular resort, though. We were riding the "Disney Magical Express," a free bus service that Disney runs between the Orlando airport and its various resorts. Each bus services several resorts, so our bus dropped off and picked up at the Contemporary, Grand Floridian, Polynesian, and Wildnerness Lodge resorts. When we arrived, we were the last resort to be dropped off. No big deal, I thought--I wanted to see the other resorts, and I figured it just meant that we'd be the last picked up on the way back to the airport.   

I was wrong. The Contemporary was the last to be dropped off and the first to be picked up for the trip back to the airport, and that extra half hour or so was significant when dealing with a squirmy toddler--and when our pick-up time back to the airport was before 8:00 a.m. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was just something I found a little annoying. The whole process was just slow: Waiting for the bus at the airport, loading a bunch of families--and their carry-on luggage/strollers, driving around to the various resorts, and then unloading the carry-ons and strollers that were stowed under the bus at each resort. I'm not sure how much round-trip cab fare is, and it's probably enough that it was worthwhile for us to take resort transportation. Nevertheless--there's nothing magical about the Magical Express.   

3. The Parks

  We've arrived at the portion of this post where I sing the praises of the off-season. Oh, February, how I love you! I think that the longest line we waited in was for the Dumbo ride at the Magic Kingdom--probably about 20 minutes or so for that notoriously slow-loader. We zoomed onto many rides with no wait at all.  

The thing that surprised me the most was seeing Nate react to the Disney characters. I expected him to be either uninterested or maybe a little scared. Instead, they turned out to be his favorite part of the experience.   We even did a couple of character breakfasts (which I'll discuss below), and he could hardly contain himself waiting for each character to arrive at our table. Perhaps the breakfasts are a little better suited to children old enough to understand the concept of waiting their turn.

Nate was able to ride on a fair number of the attractions. Here were some of our hits and misses:

Magic Kingdom

Nate loved It’s a Small World, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, and Buzz Lightyear—anything that was really colorful and had a lot to look at. He was content on Dumbo, the Astro Orbiter, Aladdin’s Magic Carpets, the People Mover, the Pirates of the Caribbean, Mickey’s Philharmagic, and the Haunted Mansion. He got incredibly fussy during the Hall of Presidents (a bummer, because I really wanted to see the whole thing) and the Country Bear Jamboree, but he was having a really hard time the morning we saw those.

David and I were able to ride things like Space Mountain and the Big Thunder Mountain railroad by “switching off,” something Disney allows for parents of small children. We’d approach the cast member at the entrance to the line and tell him we needed to switch off. He’d give us a ticket that was basically a fast pass for the second parent to use to ride after the first parent was done. Then one of us would wait outside with Nate while the other rode. The only exception was Space Mountain, where we went through the line together until almost the very end, and Nate and I were sent to the exit platform to wait for David to finish the ride. Once he was done, I was allowed to back track up to the loading platform to ride myself.

Except for Space Mountain, it seemed like if both parents had obtained Fast Passes, there was no need to get a “switch off” pass. The pass for switching off just puts the second parent into the Fast Pass line, anyway; you don’t get to skip ahead any farther than the other Fast Pass folks.

Epcot

Epcot is kind of a bust with a toddler, I thought, which is a huge bummer, because it’s such a gorgeous park. I really wish David and I could have had some time to ourselves to explore the World Showcase section.

We rode Spaceship Earth, The Land, the Three Caballeros, and the Nemo ride with Nate. All were fine, but he didn’t seem really excited about any of them. He actually got a little antsy during The Land, which is a little long and goes through a bunch of greenhouses toward the end—not so interesting for a toddler. Nate had also just ridden it with David while I was riding Soarin’, so he was seeing it for a second time.

I feel like we really didn’t get to enjoy Epcot enough. Soarin’ was the only non-Nate-friendly attraction that David and I saw, even though there are others that look interesting. But there wasn’t enough at Epcot for Nate to draw us back for a second day, and with Nate’s afternoon nap it wasn’t possible to fit in as much as we would have liked. I’m really looking forward to seeing Epcot again when Nate is elementary school-aged, when we can enjoy all of the attractions together.

Animal Kingdom

Nate absolutely loved the Animal Kingdom. For some reason, it was the only park in which he was content to ride around in his stroller. He loved seeing all of the animals, both on the Safari ride and just around the park. Animal Kingdom also had what were hands-down my favorite attractions of the trip: The Festival of the Lion King show and Finding Nemo—The Musical.
Nate was particularly entranced during the Nemo show, which was, in my opinion, completely stunning.

We also saw It's a Bug's Life, which had one moment that scared Nate. It was sort of cute, but I don't think it would be worth waiting a long time to see. David and I rode Expedition Everest, which made me ever-so-slightly queasy. (There's a part where it goes backwards, which was the issue for me.) We took Nate on the TriceraTop Spin, which was essentially just like Dumbo. Nate liked it fine.

On our last day, we decided to check out "Camp Minnie Mickey," which is just a big area with a bunch of pavilions for kids to meet the characters. Had we not discovered how much Nate adored the characters, we never would have done this--and if I'd had to wait in lines, I would NOT have wanted to do this. Instead, though, there were never more than a couple of people ahead of us to see any character, if that, and Nate was able to visit Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Chip and Dale, three rabbits and a bear (who ARE some of these characters?), all in quick succession. He was in heaven.

Aaaaaaaand . . . at this point I have rambled on for nearly 2000 words about my vacation. I still have to discuss restaurants, including the infamous 'Ohana stormout. But Nate is up from his nap, and I just need to post this already. I promise, I'll discuss Disney dining. (Expensive! Widely variable in quality!)

I'll also post a video I took of our room, in case you're interested. OR EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT.

Oh, for heaven's sake, I'm just hitting publish now.

Magic awaits

2011-02-02T13:00:00.004-05:00

Holy cats! I've really let myself go when it comes to the blogging, it seems.

We've been slogging though winter, and praise God that January is over. I think Nate is getting a touch of cabin fever, as he's uninterested in any of his toys and mostly interested in (1) clinging to my legs, and (2) giving the dog his food. Good times. I can't complain too much, though, considering that Maureen's not going to be thawed out until July.

Ah, but we leave for vacation on Sunday! We've made all of our meal "reservations" (in scare quotes because apparently Disney restaurant reservations are really more like call-ahead seating--but totally necessary if you want to go to any of the sit-down restaurants). Our room is actually a one-bedroom condo with a full kitchen, and we've arranged for grocery delivery so that we can eat breakfast most days in the room. We've bought ponchos for the inevitable rain. We bought a stroller lock after reading that apparently some people do get their strollers stolen at Disney.

David almost didn't believe me when I told him that every time I've had to call the resort, they've concluded the call by telling me to "Have a magical day!" I have to stop myself from replying "You, too!" in the same way that I've finally trained myself not to "you too" the airline counter agents who wish me a pleasant flight. I told David to get ready to hear that a lot next week, and he rolled his eyes and wondered aloud whether he'd get tired of it. I think not; the thing about enjoying Disney, in my mind, is that you have to just give yourself over to the experience, and I think that won't be a problem for either of us as we watch Nate take it all in.

So my excitement is abundant, but my fears are also numerous. At this point, they include (1) whether/how well Nate will sleep in the hotel room; (2) eating out so much, considering that any restaurant meal with a toddler can turn into a scarf-your-food-and-get-the-check-before-total-meltdown experience; and (3) the amount of time Nate will be logging in the stroller, given that he pretty much hates riding in the stroller.

But here's the thing: Underneath it all, I really believe Nate is going to love it. I think he'll be mesmerized by the spectacle of it all. I think he'll love being outside so much after being cooped up in the house for much of the last two months. I think he'll enjoy a lot of the rides. I know I will enjoy just being somewhere different for a while. For the love of all that's holy, I need a change of scenery.

T-minus four days. Here we come.

Tiny Dancer

2011-01-10T16:37:00.002-05:00

A while back, we noticed that Nate would sometimes start an almost involuntary-seeming wiggle when he heard certain songs. It's cutest when he undertakes the full-body version, but he'll still get his shoulders going when the music plays. We, of course, thought this was hilarious and did our best to encourage his funny little dance. Suddenly, within the last few days, he's learned how to "dance" upon request.

(A smile usually accompanies the dancing, but he seems to turn all serious when he sees himself on the computer screen.)

Tiny Dancer from Lauren Petron on Vimeo.

Vote for Nate!

2011-01-02T07:57:00.004-05:00

Obviously you all know that I think Nate is a shockingly adorable kid. Well, apparently, our photographer does, too. The wonderful Crystal Hardin of lily-b photography took our family photos back in November, and we were thrilled with the results. You can see all of our favorite shots here, if you'd like.

Crystal has decided to run a little contest on her website, and, unbeknownst to me, selected a photo of Nate as one of the entries. The prize is a lovely photo frame with a print of the entered photo. The real prize, though, is the joy of sweet, sweet victory.

Now, I think y'all know that I would never have entered Nate in any sort of contest on my own. I hate to lose, and the prospect of some misguided people selecting some other child as cuter than my little guy (other than YOUR children, of course, who clearly equal Nate in the looks department)--well, the thought of it makes me sad. And yet here we find ourselves entered in this contest, and so it's up to YOU, dear readers, to see to it that this contest doesn't make me cry.

So would you please take a minute and go vote for Nate's photo? You can vote once a day, every day, until next Sunday, January 9th, at midnight. The website will ask for your e-mail address, so that Crystal can make sure folks are only voting once per day, but she will not share or publish your address.

You may vote every day at Crystal's site. Nate's photo is NUMBER FOUR. I really wish she had selected the color version of this photo, because Nate's blue eyes are just to die for, but again, I didn't make the selection. In case you need a reminder about how cute this kid really is, here's the color version.

Please go and vote for my little guy, because the parents of the baby girl in photo one were apparently recruiting votes last night before I even knew about this contest, and she's currently in the lead. Let's win this thing! I want the pretty, pretty photo frame . . . but I want bragging rights even more.

Morning light

2010-12-31T08:37:00.001-05:00

I woke up this morning to light in my bedroom. As in sunshine. Outside the windows. And although I’m well aware that the sun will, indeed, come out tomorrow, I don’t usually have the opportunity to awaken to it. My Nate, you see, is an early riser. We’re fortunate these days that we’re more often than not seeing a six on the clock instead of a five (or a four!) when we first hear him through the monitor, but he still likes to throw in an extra-early rising now and again, just to keep us on our toes.

But back to this morning. The sun. It was disorienting, and I had a brief and shining moment during which I thought that Nate was still asleep. I often wake before him at 5:45 or 6:00, and then spend a few minutes trying desperately to get myself back to sleep before I hear his little voice. But awakening before the baby when winter sun is already peeking through the window blinds? That, my friends, is something I could handle.

I turned my head toward my nightstand, where David plugs in the baby monitor when he goes to bed, after I’m already asleep. Usually, it’s bright with tiny lights—the power indicator, plus all of the various “noise indicator lights,” which are perpetually lit on Nate’s monitor from the white noise we run in his room. Today, though, it was all dark. Off. As in, not on. As in, holy heck, my kid could be in there crying right now, and could have been crying for an hour, and I wouldn’t hear him over the white noise running in my own room.

[Sidebar: When Nate was first born, we undertook an experiment in discontinuing the white noise in our bedroom so that we could just hear him from his room and not through the baby monitor. The experiment was an epic failure of sleeplessness (on my part), culminating in advice from another mother that, if your husband is a snorer, just use the dang monitor and run the white noise already.]

I threw a little prayer heavenward as I reached for the power button, holding onto the tiniest glimmer of hope that my earlybird would still be asleep at 7:15 a.m. Alas, it wasn’t to be. His image brightened the screen and I saw him pacing the crib in his fleece sleep sack.

[Have you ever seen a toddler walk in a sleep sack? I mean, one without the foot holes? It’s actually pretty cute and hilarious.]

He wasn’t crying, though, and his face wasn’t puffy or tear-stained when I picked him up. I don’t know whether he had been awake for five minutes or forty-five, although I suspect it wasn’t for too long, as he does tend to get agitated after a little while if no one comes to free him from his crib.

He’s been playing happily since we came downstairs, and now he’s scarfing down apple tea bread like breakfast is his job. I’m still a little freaked out by what-ifs, but clearly he’s no worse for the wear.

I suppose I’ll just be grateful for a good night’s sleep. But I’m still going to ask David about the monitor when he gets up.

I know I should stop him, but it's just too cute

2010-12-07T10:22:00.002-05:00

Is there anything you let your child do because you find it adorable, even though you know you'll probably regret it later?

We have these beautiful curtains in our great room. I can't take credit for them, except insofar as I thought to include them in our purchase contract for the house. The previous owner had them made, and I loved them when we looked at the house.

An almost identical set of custom-made curtains was actually included in the October issue of Better Homes & Gardens--what a surprise to see a feature on another house in Alexandria with the same drapes in a different color! Same fabric type, same style, same trim; boy was the previous owner annoyed when I showed her the article. I think she had picked out the trim herself, and then her decorator had gone and used it for another client.

I didn't try telling her that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I know how much that adage annoyed me as a kid when my younger sister would copy me.

But today Nate has decided that he loves hiding in the curtains. I feel like I should get him to stop, lest he someday ruin them with sticky hands or a too-enthusiastic tug. I just can't right now, though, because it might be one of the cutest things I've ever seen. So for today, at least, I'm letting him have his fun.

Seven Quick Takes

2010-12-03T14:20:00.003-05:00

1. I was in the car last night when the radio DJ told what she apparently thought was a hilarious story about her grandchildren being terrified to get in Santa's lap. Then, a few songs later, I heard a commercial announcing that the same station was holding a contest for the funniest photo of listeners' children scared or crying during a visit with Santa. My immediate reaction was: How is this funny? Kids are scared of a lot of things that we know there's no reason to fear, but that doesn't mean their fear is less real. Seriously, if your child is scared of Santa, why in heaven's name would you force him to sit on Santa's lap, anyway? I just fail to see how this is funny. Am I crazy?

2. I found a charming book for Nate the other day that I couldn't resist. It's a pretty hardcover book with a short story (one page per day) for every day from December first through Christmas. I know he's too young for it this year (although that didn't stop me from trying to read him the first story on Wednesday), but I thought it would be a nice Advent tradition in the coming years. It's something short and simple, and seemed like a nice thing to add to the advent wreath and calendar.

3. My old Yahoo e-mail account got hacked yesterday, which sucks. And somehow the hacking spread to my gmail account, which shut down. Even though I was able to get the gmail account restored, all of my contacts have been erased. It's infuriating.

4. I think we've settled on Nate's Christmas presents. He already has a lot of toys, and he's likely to get more from our parents and siblings for Christmas. (Which I'm in favor of! I think I enjoy his toys as much as he does.) We wanted to get him something "big," but not a big toy, so we've decided to get him one nice toy, plus an Anywhere Chair and a child-sized wooden table and chairs. I think it would be nice as he gets big enough to color and do little projects for him to have his own, small table and chair. For his Saint Nicholas Day present, I got him two sets of these egg-shaped shakers. He loves them in music class, and I can't wait for him to see them on Monday.

5. I got two pots of paperwhites this week for my kitchen windowsill. I've always wanted to force paperwhites during the holidays, but I always think about it too late. But I happened to see them already forced and in pots at Whole Foods on Wednesday, so now I can enjoy them all month! (Incidentally, when I told Arwen that I'd bought paperwhites, she thought I'd said "diaper wipes" and didn't understand what all the fuss was about.)

6. Poor David (and his dad) tried to install magnetic cabinet locks last weekend, and they didn't work. It's a total bummer, because I've been making do with rubber bands on the cabinet handles for months. The cabinet below the TV--where we keep the modem, wireless router, and printer--doesn't even have handles, so I've had to shove a chair against it. (Nate can move the chair, by the way, so it's only a semi-successful deterrent.) I don't know whether the wood is too dense, or whether one of the locks was a dud, but I'm afraid to try to install them if we're not confident they're going to open when we need them to open. So I guess we're going with these simpler ones instead. I'm pretty sure Nate will figure out how to open them eventually, though.

7. I'm looking for a good book to read. I had been reading Endurance, about Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to cross Antarctica, but I've gotten a bit bogged down. I mean, it's amazing that they all survived and everything, but reading about them eating blubber and having to kill the dogs (sad!) is getting old. I've heard great things about The Help. Any other recommendations?

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Yours, Mine, and Ours

2010-11-30T19:33:00.007-05:00

David and Miriel are sitting at the kitchen table, talking finances. David put Miriel on a budget when she started her job, and he's excellent with money. He takes care of ALL of our finances, a fact which makes me inordinately happy. Perhaps it's because I have vivid memories of my finances during law school, when I was so poor that I had to borrow money from my church to pay my rent at the first of the month one August, because my scholarship check wouldn't be available until classes started in mid-August.

We get a lot of questions about how we handle finances, and I remember someone a long while back asking about it in the comments. I think it's a great way for married couples to deal with money, if they can handle the multitude of accounts it involves.

In a nutshell, we have:

A joint checking account,
A joint savings account,
My checking account,
My savings account,
David's checking account,
David's savings account, and
A money market account.

When David gets paid (and back when I used to get paid), David transfers portions of the money into the various accounts electronically. All of our household expenses, including the mortgage, utilities, car payments, groceries, gas, and insurance, as well as things like restaurant meals together, church tithing, and everything related to Nate, are paid out of the joint checking account. We also have a larger chunk of money--a few months of living expenses--in the checking account as an emergency fund. (It's in the checking account because it's an interest-bearing account with a large minimum balance.) (Also! I didn't even know it was in this account until David just told me. I thought it was in the money market account.)

Much, much smaller amounts of money go into our separate checking and savings accounts. Out of our separate accounts, we pay for things like our own clothes, makeup, books and magazines, haircuts and color, separate restaurant meals, gifts for each other, and so forth.

The joint savings account is where we stick extra money until we need to use it to cover things above and beyond what's in the joint checking account. It's also where we pay for holiday gifts and other gifts for family. This year, with the move and all of the associated expenses, there's pretty much nothing in the joint savings account.

Not to worry, though! Because the real "savings" account is the money market account, where we save up longer-term, bigger-ticket items. For example, this is what we use to pay for travel and large home purchases (like furniture or appliances). It's also the home for our tax reserve. Because David is a partner now, he is "self-employed" for tax purposes. This means that we have to pay estimated quarterly taxes; they aren't taken out of David's paychecks automatically. We have to set aside the money ourselves--and David told me to tell you that if everyone in America had to set aside money and write a check to the government several times a year, we'd all be Republicans.

The drawback to this system is this: It's pretty complicated. Clearly this isn't a drawback for me, considering that David handles all the finances himself.

But here's the upside: It's easy to know who should pay for what. Joint expenses come out of joint funds, instead of some convoluted division in which the husband pays Bill A and the wife pays Bill B. And yet! We still have our own money to buy each other gifts, which is nice. And David never gets bent out of shape about how much I spend on my hair, and I never get bent out of shape about how much he spends on his clothes--because it's our own separate money. This was a really important thing back when David had time to play golf or go to Vegas or Atlantic City with friends--expensive activities that I might have frowned upon if they were funded with money I'd wanted to use on, say, a new sofa.

I don't think anyone needs to have quite as many accounts as we have to make this idea work. The basic concept is just Yours, Mine, and Ours. Everything for the household and family is paid out of Our money, but You and I still get a little bit of separate money to spend or save as we see fit. I wonder how many money fights could be avoided with a little bit of separate money for each spouse.

So that's it: Yours, Mine, and Ours. I highly recommend it. Of course, I also highly recommend suckering your spouse into doing all of the finances, especially if you're fortunate enough to have one who is as good at is as mine is.

Christmas Novena

2010-11-29T20:28:00.002-05:00

Two years ago, Arwen told me about a novena she'd prayed three years earlier. She had been trying to get pregnant for two years at that point (ironic, isn't it, that she'll have FOUR children next summer?), and she was turning to this special, powerful prayer.

I knew, of course, that she got pregnant with Camilla less than two months after the novena was done, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any doubts that it would "work" for us. I mean, I know that God answers every prayer, but I also know that the answer isn't always the one we'd hoped for. We'd been waiting over three years for a baby by then, and I had only one fallopian tube, and I was ten years older than she'd been when the novena worked for her, and . . . let's just say I was hopeful, but hesitant.

But pray we did. As did the rest of Arwen's family, and less than a month after Christmas we found out I was expecting Nate.

Needless to say, then, I'm a big believer in this novena. We'll be praying it again this year, starting tomorrow, on the feast of Saint Andrew. The prayer is recited fifteen times per day from November 30th through Christmas. It's a lovely prayer and very easy to memorize.

If you'd like to join in, make sure you choose a good intention. This is one powerful prayer!

I have a feeling that thinking about decorating isn't really how I should observe the first Sunday of Advent

2010-11-28T19:50:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to decide when we should put up our Christmas decorations. I know that a lot of people put them up this weekend, and some even put them up before Thanksgiving-- the horror!

We've tried over the past few years to observe Advent better, and not to let ourselves automatically get swept into Christmas. In 2008, we waited particularly late to obtain and put up our tree, refraining until the fourth Sunday of Advent. As a result, we almost couldn't find a tree at all! It was stressful and frustrating.

Last year, my mother was visiting earlier in December, and we put up the tree while she was here so that we had an extra set of hands with Nate during the decorating!

It's hard to strike the right balance. I'd always been a fairly early decorator. And although I fully understand the reason for postponing the Christmas merriment, it's very difficult to do. I love, love, love listening to Christmas music on the radio, for example, of both the sacred and secular variety. The radio stations, though, drop the Christmas music as early as the day after Christmas. If I don't listen early, I feel like I miss out on part of the seasonal fun; listening to my own few Christmas CDs in the car just isn't the same.

Even though I love keeping my own house decorated at least through Epiphany, if not through the Baptism of the Lord, the decorations are long gone almost everywhere else--save for church, of course.

And, of course, there's something in me that feels a bit Grinch-like in protesting early celebration too much.

So I'm trying to figure this out. The fourth Sunday of Advent was definitely too late for the tree purchasing, but perhaps the third Sunday would work. I'm thinking perhaps we could put up some of the non-tree decorations next Sunday, put up the rest of the non-tree decorations and buy the tree on the weekend of the third Sunday, and decorate the tree on the fourth Sunday.

Anyway, the internet is no longer working for some reason, so I’ve copied and pasted this into a Word document to finish it. I might not be able to post tonight, but at least it’ll be all ready to go as soon as we’re back online.

Too excited to sleep!

2010-11-27T13:45:00.004-05:00

We actually did it. Yesterday we pulled the trigger and booked our trip to Disney World.

I am thinking of little else. I go to bed feeling like the family in this commercial--too excited to sleep. (How hilarious is that little boy, by the way?) David and I have been reading The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World and The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World with Kids and reading passages out loud to each other. We've been scoping out the Disney website and various unaffiliated sites for information.

We found a hotel on the property that offers "villas"--we'll be staying in an actual one-bedroom condo with a full kitchen, in a building that's adjacent to the Contemporary resort. (Hooray for being on the monorail line!) I don't think we'll cook, but it will be good to be able to eat breakfast and keep refrigerated snacks and drinks in the room.

We're going in early February, which makes me happy. Not only will we be escaping D.C. during the worst of winter, but it's truly the off season at Disney. I do not like the heat and would not want to have to push Nate around in 95-degree weather, and I really, really don't like crowds. I grew up outside Atlanta, and we'd go to Six Flags Over Georgia for church youth group trips or as a family. My very favorite visit to that park, though, was in college, when I went on a 50-degree day in March. There were no crowds, no lines, and no blazing sun. We practically walked onto every ride; I don't think we ever waited for more than ten minutes. If we liked a ride, we went from the exit straight back to the entrance to ride again. It was terrific. I don't expect Disney to be as sparsely attended, even in the off season, but it's got to be better than the peak times.

We're also planning on taking a couple of days at each of the parks we want to see. We're arriving mid-day on Sunday and leaving the following Saturday, so we got a six-day pass to the parks. (Did you know that after you reach three days, the incremental price increase for each additional day is only around $5--or less!--per day? The price for an adult three-day pass is $233.24 right now, but it's only $246.02 for a six-day pass--less than $13 more for three additional days! We figured it was worth having passes for the day we arrive at that price, even if we just go to dinner in Epcot or something.) Obviously we won't be able to hang around the parks all day with Nate, so I'm glad we won't be cramming everything into one day per park. We're totally taking Maggie's advice and doing the parks as soon as they open, lunch, naptime in the room for Nate, then back to the parks for a parade or dinner or more attractions.

At Patti's recommendation, we already have a reservation for dinner at 'Ohana in the Polynesian resort, and we made a reservation for breakfast at the Crystal Palace with the Pooh characters. I'm quite confident that Nate is too young to appreciate any of the characters, so we're not doing any other character meals, but we wanted to give it a shot.

And that's it for plans so far. I want to make more meal reservations and figure out whether I can squeeze in at least one spa treatment during Nate's afternoon naps. I just don't feel like I've been on vacation unless I go to a spa.

Did I mention that I'm excited???

Nate Walking

2010-11-26T20:46:00.002-05:00

This isn't a good video AT ALL, but it's the first we were able to get of Nate walking. Every time we pull out the phone to record him, he drops to his knees and scuttles over to it as fast as he can; he's much faster crawling than walking.

As you'll see, he loves seeing himself in the camera phone. (I had it flipped around so that it was recording from the camera on the front side, which amused Nate, but which made it really difficult to see what we were recording later on.)

He's been walking a little more and more every day, though he still prefers to crawl. It's so much fun to watch it click for him, though. I think watching him learn new things is my favorite part of being a mom.

Thankful

2010-11-25T20:41:00.002-05:00

David fell asleep sitting up on the couch after dinner, so I'm declaring it a success. I took video, but I don't think he'd be very happy if I shared it here.

Everyone said the food was delicious. I have to say that I agree. When I told one of my neighbors yesterday that we were brining the turkey, she informed me that after she'd had her first brined bird, she decided she never wanted to have turkey any other way. She was completely right--it was that good. And maybe it's because we bought a fresh Amish-raised turkey from the local butcher instead of a frozen Butterball, but, lands, was that a flavorful bird. I'm already looking forward to the leftovers.

And! And! I successfully made from-scratch gravy. And it wasn't lumpy, and it thickened up properly, and it was hands-down the most delicious turkey gravy I've ever had in my life. I know I'm totally bragging here, but you would be too if you'd made this gravy. The gravy was the one thing I was affirmatively worried about, because it's notoriously finicky, but it all came together in the end.

The only casualty of the day was our instant-read meat thermometer, which I've learned can't stay stuck in the bird while it's in the oven. (Is there some thermometer that goes into the oven with the turkey? Or is that my imagination?)

And now I am just . . . so . . . tired. The dishes are going to wait until tomorrow.

But I won't sign off without saying that I'm so thankful. I'm thankful for the most wonderful husband anyone could ask for. I'm thankful for our beautiful, hilarious, precious little boy. I'm thankful for family and friends who love me. I'm thankful for a comfortable home, plenty of food to eat, and warm clothes. I'm thankful that David's job lets me spend every day with my son.

Most of all, I'm thankful for the gift of faith, and for a Church that holds fast to what is true and beautiful despite unceasing pressure to change. And I'm thankful that the Lord of all creation somehow sees fit to love a creature like me.

Really, aren't baby butts cute either way?

2010-11-24T21:14:00.002-05:00

I have a shameful secret: I've been using disposable diapers for the last month, and I'm loving it.

We switched Nate to cloth diapers back in January, after the breastmilk poop fought the Huggies and won a few too many times.

I generally have never minded using the cloth. They're adorable, they really aren't that much of a pain to wash, and they allow me to feel a tiny bit of that smug superiority that environmentalists all seem to carry around with them.

Our new house, though, has a front-loading washer instead of a top loader, and a somewhat old one at that. I'm sure front loaders have improved in recent years in their ability to get clothes really clean, but this one totally sucks. Within a couple of weeks of moving into the new place, I started to notice that Nate's wet diapers would get a strong ammonia odor that they'd never had before.

I'd always been perfectly happy with the diapers before just by running a cold cycle with no detergent, then a hot cycle with a small amount of Charlie's Soap, then an extra rinse. I'd been trying the same routine here, but I just can't get enough water in the machine.

I tried stripping them (running them through the wash multiple times without detergent, in order to remove detergent buildup), but there was no improvement. I also switched to a different brand of detergent that is supposed to rinse out of diapers particularly well. It hasn't worked.

And then, last month, Nate got a horrible yeast diaper rash. It took days and days and a ton of Lotrimin to get it cleared up, and we had to use disposables while using the cream on him. In the meantime, I ran the cloth diapers through multiple hot cycles with bleach to kill the yeast.

The day I put him back in the cloth diapers, he started to get a rash again.

That was the last straw. I told David that I wasn't going to use the cloth diapers any more until we could get a top-loading washer that would make me feel confident that Nate's diapers were getting clean. At the time, I felt kind of bad about it. I'd been using disposables in the diaper bag and when we traveled (I learned on our first trip to see my family in Georgia that traveling with cloth isn't worth the hassle), and I always felt a little guilty when I had to throw a diaper away.

I have to admit, though, that over the past month I have not-so-secretly been enjoying the disposables. I decidedly do not enjoy the smell, which can be awful--we don't have a Diaper Genie or anything similar, and a few poopy diapers in the nursery trash can (which is a really nice Simple Human can with a lid, not something with an open top) can make things really foul really quick. But I had come to dread dumping Nate's diapers into the toilet, using the diaper sprayer (which seems to get water everywhere), and trying to keep Nate from either grabbing the diaper or sticking his hand into the dirty water before I could get everything flushed away.

Here's the thing: Everyone who uses cloth talks about how easy it really is. And it's true. Using cloth diapers is a lot easier than you'd expect using cloth diapers to be. Before Nate started solids, it was really a cinch, because I didn't have to dump and rinse poopy diapers.

But the fact that it's easier than you'd think does not mean that it's easier than using disposables. And so even though I'm feeling slightly guilty at the sheer number of diapers I'm putting out with the trash every week, I can't say I really mind having to take a hiatus from cloth. I'll still go back to the cloth when we acquire a new washer, both because it seems silly to have invested in a nice cloth diaper stash and then use disposables unnecessarily, and also because I really am susceptible to guilt from the tree-hugging types.

For now, though? I'll take easy.

Thanksgiving Plan

2010-11-23T21:43:00.002-05:00

The linens are ironed. The table is set. The wine is purchased. I picked up the turkey from the butcher today, and David and I braved the grocery this evening.

If all goes well, my in-laws will arrive in town tomorrow evening, so that they can watch Nate during Thursday's cooking. Regardless, tomorrow will be the day for turkey brining, potato mashing, and pumpkin bread baking (for Bobby Flay's pumpkin bread pudding). David only has to work in the morning, so I practically feel like the holiday has already begun!

I really don't want the cooking to get overwhelming on Thursday. Our friends are bringing two of the side dishes, so that makes things easier. Getting the potatoes done is also huge; peeling and dicing potatoes the day of stresses me out. (Arwen told me a great tip for reheating mashed potatoes: The crock pot! Who knew!)

I probably need to make some kind of detailed list so that I don't forget to do something on Thursday.

Okay, this officially wins the award for the most boring post ever, but it's 10:15 and I usually go to bed at 9:30 and Nate will not be sympathetic and sleep later if I stay up trying to craft a better post. So I'm hitting publish and promising better things for tomorrow.

Veteran

2010-11-22T19:57:00.004-05:00

I have a distinct memory of attending my Bible study only a couple of weeks after Nate was born. I was taking him with me, of course, and was one of several women sitting around the table in my small group with an infant along. At some point I needed to do something with my hands, so I crossed my left ankle over my right knee, creating a little triangular bed for Nate, and laid him in my lap for a few moments.

It was a move I hadn't tried before, but I'd seen Arwen do it plenty of times. It must be kind of a veteran mom move, though, because the woman sitting next to me immediately asked me how many other children I had. She was surprised when I told her that Nate was my first. I guess I looked like I had things under control.

It's funny that I remember that moment, because looking back at the first several months of Nate's life, it seems like a blur of being entirely out of control--and not in a healthy, "go with the flow and just meet your kid's needs" kind of way. More in a "sleep-deprived haze punctuated by yelling at my husband for no reason" kind of way. In other words, it was ugly.

I remember the way Nate would always poop or spit up on his outfit just as we were ready to leave the house. I remember feeling like it was almost impossible to go anywhere, because he was just going to need to nurse again in less than the time it would take to run an errand. I remember absolutely loathing that stupid infant carrier, which was heavy and awkward and never did fit properly in a shopping cart.

I remember crying--a lot--and wondering whether I would ever feel like I had this motherhood gig down.

I'm not sure when I turned the corner. Maybe it was when Nate started sitting up on his own, so that he could play a little bit by himself. More likely it was when he finally started sleeping better. Regardless, I wish my earlier self could see me now. I actually enjoy taking Nate on errands or to restaurants. I'm completely happy to let him play on his own for as long as he'll be entertained. I know what he wants and needs--usually--and I'm just good at taking care of him.

I'm beginning to feel like that veteran mom I was mistaken for over a year ago. It feels really, really good.

Vacation Magic

2010-11-21T20:37:00.002-05:00

I think we're really going to do it. All of your positive comments about taking toddlers on vacation have emboldened us, and we're pretty much decided that we're going to go to Disney World next year.

The challenge (well, not the only challenge, I'm sure) is in the timing. It turns out that going in March, when we'd initially wanted to go, is "peak" season--with peak prices and, one can assume, peak crowds. April is out; my sister is getting married early in the month, and David's firm's partner retreat is later in April. I don't want to go during the summer, because walking all over several huge theme parks with a toddler in tow doesn't sound very magical to me. And yet we think we want to go sooner rather than later.

Google tells me that the average high temperature in February is right around 73 degrees, with the average low around 50. Even though it would be a bit of a bummer not to be able to take advantage of what are apparently pretty amazing pools at a lot of the resort hotels, that weather seems basically perfect for walking around the parks.

That doesn't actually give us that much time to plan, but I figure if A'Dell can head to Disney on four days' notice and still have an amazing time, surely we can pull it off in a few months.

This is SO preliminary right now, and yet the thought of going somewhere fun as a family makes me SO excited. And it seems like a good idea to have something fun to look forward to during the depressing, stir craziness-inducing time that is post-holidays winter. (Though after the blizzards last year, you'd better believe we'll be purchasing travel insurance.) I'm buying this book tomorrow, and I see ton of internet research in my future. (Item #1: Which on-site hotel offers suites with an actual separate bedroom?)

It feels kind of crazy, but I'm counting on crazy turning out to be lots of fun.

Coaster Nate

2010-11-20T20:50:00.001-05:00

This video isn't from this weekend, but I hadn't had a chance to share it yet.

There's a playground a couple of blocks from our house that is officially called Beverley Park, but everyone refers to it as "The Pit." It's actually in the location of an old gravel pit, and it's terrific because the sides slope up all around it, making it really easy for parents to keep an eye on their kids. It has all of the standard playground equipment--swings, sandbox, climbing areas, slides--but it also has something kind of unusual. There's a big cement pad where parents leave trikes and ride-on toys that their kids are no longer using. The toys will disappear once they are broken or otherwise unusable, and new (well, new to the playground) toys will appear in their place.

Several weeks ago, one of these roller coasters appeared. It has been the toy for all of the kids ever since then, but I'd always been afraid to put Nate on it. Of course, the first time David saw the thing, all he wanted to do was let Nate try it out. So we did, and of course Nate loved it.

Here's the video evidence.

2010-11-19T18:56:00.002-05:00

First of all, I'd like to thank David for stepping up last night and posting for me after I got into bed and realized that I'd forgotten to write anything. Way to keep NaBloPoMo alive, honey!

* * * * *

Y'all, I am on the ball about Christmas this year. I've always dreaded shopping in years past and so I always put it off . . . and then I dread it even more because it's so late and I still have so many presents to buy and OMG I'm never going to be done with it all so why don't I just go sit in a corner and complain about how Christmas is too commercialized anyway.

Up until last year I had always been working, of course, or in school dealing with finals, and then last year I had a small, frequently angry baby to contend with. I didn't want to face the crowds at the stores, and yet the longer I waited to head out, the worse the crowds got. It was a vicious cycle.

But this year! I have already selected our Christmas card and uploaded the proper photos. I have a decent idea of what we're going to get most of our family members. I even know what I'm getting for David, who is notoriously hard to shop for, because (1) he just goes out and buys everything he wants, and (2) if he hasn't bought it yet, it's because it's insanely expensive and more than you want to spend on a Christmas gift. I'm totally psyched to see Nate experience Christmas this year, because I think he's actually going to enjoy seeing all the lights and hearing the music and opening presents. (Regardless, it has to beat last year, when David and I ended up taking turns eating Christmas dinner while the other one held Nate in an upstairs bedroom.)

I am going to get our shopping done in a timely manner, so that it doesn't overtake the season for me. And with the shopping done, I'll have time to do some of the things I've been wanting do do in seasons past, but haven't had time for:

Drive around our town playing Christmas music on the radio and looking for the best light displays
Watch It's a Wonderful Life and White Christmas--both of which I've never seen (I know!)--while eating popcorn popped on the stove and drinking hot chocolate
Go see The Nutcracker
Visit the National Christmas Tree
Walk around Old Town to see the lights on King Street and the decorations on the old rowhouses
Find someplace to hear a performance of the Christmas portions of Handel's Messiah

What about you? Are there any special activities you're looking forward to during the Christmas season?

Vanity - All is Vanity

2010-11-18T21:21:00.008-05:00

I have a strange fascination with vanity license plates. I appreciate it when someone comes up with something clever, like a creative description of the car to which the plate is attached. Living in Washington, DC, we also see a fair number of political license plates, like this:

Can we guess the driver's party affiliation?

The ones that leave me scratching my head, though, are the ones that are just so, well, vain. You have to wonder what possesses someone to go with this:

If true, do you need the vanity plate to proclaim it?

There's also the trend, perhaps peculiar to women, to adopt vanity plates that tout the driver's physical beauty or other supposedly desirable attributes. You know, plates like "2CUTE" and "SO HOT" and "DIVA." (Actually, there are lots of variations on diva, which leads me to conclude that not everyone understands that term's connotation.) Or plates like this:

If you say so.

Sometimes I'll see something a little different, which amuses me for a moment. Then I wonder what the person is compensating for:

Only in his own mind.

My all-time favorite, though, is the woman driving a Lexus RX300 I've seen several times on I-395, though I've never been able to score a photo: LEXY LDY.

Personally, if I were going to get a vanity plate, I might try for something like "NRCISSUS." But I'm not sure I'm really that vain.

2010-11-17T20:47:00.002-05:00

Today was a less than stellar day.

It started off well enough. Nate actually slept until 6:00 this morning, a significant improvement when I'm used to seeing a 5 or even a 4 on the clock when he wakes up. David and I were in good moods. Nate was in a good mood. His morning nap and music class were great.

And then, the afternoon hit. He refused to sleep at all this afternoon, and consequently was fussy and clingy until after dinnertime. The dog was barking her head off all afternoon and driving me up the wall. David had to cancel our date night when one of his clients asked for a conference call involving one of his firm's offices in Asia.

So I decided to improve my evening. Miriel, God bless her, went to the grocery for me when we no longer needed her to babysit. David was at home to take the conference call, so I decided to take myself out to dinner. I went to a Cajun restaurant just down the street from our house and settled into a booth in the bar with my December Real Simple. After a glass of wine, an order of crawfish and shrimp beignets, and a bowl of she crab soup, I'm feeling much better about the world.

* * * * *

I also wanted to say thank you for all of the vacation advice. I think that once Nate is well and truly down to one nap a day, giving us a chunk of time early in the day to get out of the room or condo or whatever, we'll just suck it up and brave it. I'm impressed that so many of you took or are taking big trips with babies and young toddlers! You're inspiring me to be brave and give it a go!

. . . had to get away

2010-11-16T20:35:00.003-05:00

I have vacation on the brain.

It's probably because we haven't taken one since Nate was born, and we won't be taking one for the foreseeable future. We've gone to Georgia to visit my family a couple of times, and I took Nate to Michigan once to visit Arwen and her family, but we haven't done an actual vacation. And after those trips, I'm not sure that it's really do-able.

Ever since we sleep-trained Nate, he really has to be in his own room to sleep. The last time we were at my parents' house, we tried a night in the same room with him. He fell asleep fine, because we weren't in the room at that point, and we were able to creep into bed silently later on. But once he woke up and realized we were in there with him, he wanted us.

I think this pretty much means that we can't go anywhere and stay in a hotel. Of course, that would have been problematic even if Nate would sleep in our room; what would we do, go to bed at 7:00 when he goes down for the night?

I know we could go and rent a cabin or a condo somewhere and give Nate his own room, but between his early bedtime and his naps, I feel like we'd be really limited in what kind of sightseeing or activities we could do. And, of course, my preferred vacation activity--lying beside a pool with a book and a cocktail--isn't feasible with a one year old in tow.

There are so many vacations I am eagerly anticipating taking with Nate and, God willing, any more children we have. I can't wait to take him to Disney World. I want to play with him on the beach at Kiawah Island and go kayaking through the marsh, looking for dolphins. I want to take him sightseeing in New York. I want to show him the Grand Canyon (and see it myself!). When he's older, I want to take him to Rome.

But how do you swing vacation with such a little guy? Until he's weaned, a trip away from him for any longer than a weekend is pretty much out of the question, and frankly I'm not sure I'd be ready to leave him for longer even if he weren't still nursing. So it's either bring him along or stay home.

Have any of you had successful vacations with a one year old? Where did you go? What were your accommodations like? Did you go with family or friends who could help look after the little one? Did it seem like your kid(s) enjoyed themselves? Was it all just more trouble than it's worth?

An evening walk

2010-11-15T20:41:00.003-05:00

I walked around our neighborhood this evening in the fading light, pushing Nate in his stroller. We were both content to be outside, looking around at the trees and the houses with the leaves crunching in our path.

I love walking around in the evenings, as the houses light up from the inside. I love to catch little glimpses through the windows, glimpses that are hidden in the bright sunshine. Everything seems so snug and cozy as the rooms are bathed in warm lamplight, with bookshelves lining a wall or flowers gracing a tabletop.

The early evening darkness of late fall is justifiably unpopular for many reasons: Kids have less time to play outside with friends. Workers emerge from their offices into the already-black night. The exhaustion the accompanies the end of a day creeps in too early and steals away the evening hours. The cold settles in quickly as the sun's rays fade away.

But peering at the welcoming squares of light, I appreciated the dusky blanket falling over our neighborhood. And then, as we breathed in the chilly air and shuffled through the fallen leaves, Nate and I made our way back to our own warm home, where our windows, too, glowed in welcome.

Apple-icious!

2010-11-14T21:21:00.003-05:00

So remember how I said yesterday that Nate was obsessed with an apple during the photo shoot? Here he is just before the shoot, when we discovered that he would, in fact, devour an entire apple. (I need to remember next time to turn my phone the other way when shooting video. Sorry the picture is so skinny!)

Photo Fail

2010-11-13T19:39:00.003-05:00

Oh, y'all. We had professional pictures scheduled for 3:00 this afternoon. I had been looking forward to getting these pictures taken for weeks; we haven't had any done since Nate was only a week or so old, and I was excited to get some new photos to display around the house and to get a nice photo for our Christmas cards.

Now I am just praying that any of them turn out well. Nate was beastly. He hasn't been himself lately, but today was particularly bad. He woke up at 4:30 this morning and wouldn't go back to sleep. He took a good morning nap, but refused to sleep this afternoon at all. (Remember that whole nap transition thing I mentioned? Well, the one-nap situation lasted for all of two days. On day three he was cranky and yawning at 9:00 a.m. and more or less demanded a nap. He's been back to two ever since, although for the past few days the afternoon naps have been really short or--like today--nonexistent.)

As a result, our usually-smiley, easygoing baby was surly and touchy. He basically refused to smile at all, showing teeth only when David tickled him. He squirmed and crawled away every time we tried to sit with him in one of our laps for a family shot. He consistently turned away from the camera when we tried to do more candid shots with him. At some point we decided to give him an apple we'd brought along, because he was eating one earlier today, and it was pretty cute. He refused to surrender the apple for the rest of the shoot, wailing every time we tried to move it away for a picture. I swear, that darn apple will be featured prominently in any shot that turns out at all.

And I felt so badly, because our photographer was an absolute joy. She's several years younger than we are, but, like me, she's a southern girl who went to law school and now stays at home with her kid. Her daughter is less than a week younger than Nate. She clerked for a federal judge after law school so she must have done really well--but still gave it up for motherhood. And she is totally adorable and was so friendly and patient. I seriously want to become mom friends with her.

I love the work she shows on her site, so I'm hoping that by some miracle she managed to capture Nate's adorable side despite his cloudy demeanor today. And don't even get me on how fussy he was at dinner, a dinner we'd had planned for weeks with friends who we never get to see. We probably should have canceled, but we felt like it was too late to back out (and besides, we really wanted to see our friends). Instead of getting good time to catch up with us, our poor friends--and fellow dining patrons--were literally subjected to Nate screaming in the restaurant. Again, something he never does.

He's asleep now, having passed out more or less the instant he went into the crib. And I'm pondering whether to drown my mood in a glass of wine or just go straight to bed. I have a feeling bed is going to win out.

Holidays

2010-11-12T19:47:00.003-05:00

So I realized this week that Thanksgiving is a mere two weeks away. In fact, as of today, it's less than two weeks away. Last year we spent Thanksgiving at my dad's house here in town, and so we had no responsibility--a good thing considering we had a baby who was only a month and a half old. This year, though, we're hosting David's parents and some good friends of ours, and we'll be doing most of the cooking. I've never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner before, so I'm a little nervous. One of my projects for next week is to create a detailed list of what I need to accomplish each day leading up to the big event, so that I don't have to worry about getting out the china or figuring out a centerpiece on the same day I'm trying to roast a turkey. I'm excited, though, to start a tradition of holidays in our new home. Frankly, it's what I've always wanted.

Even with Thanksgiving still ahead of us, though, I'm already looking ahead to Advent and Christmas. I am determined this year to get my shopping done early. I have a tendency to put it off because I dread going out and facing all the commercialization head-on, and then I end up stressed out that I haven't finished. It too easily ruins my Advent and pulls my focus away from higher things. How do you tackle your shopping without letting it take over the season?

Here's my other big Christmas question: How do you handle Santa in your family? We've decided that we're not going to "do" Santa in our house. David and I both had "Santa" bring us gifts, and I honestly don't have any memory of the point at which I found out Santa wasn't real; it must not have been traumatic. Nevertheless, I had been dubious about doing Santa for Nate when a conversation with Arwen sealed it for me. She explained that her parents had never told her and her siblings that Santa was real, but that Christmas had always been magical anyway. As she grew up and her friends learned the truth about who was bringing them gifts, she saw Christmas lose some of its luster for them. Meanwhile, it always remained as special as it had ever been for her.

That means a lot to me. I don't want Christmas to ever become less special or less wonderful for Nate. More importantly, though, I want Nate to trust David and me, and I fear that if we basically lie to him about something like Santa (even with the lovely intention of giving him a fun experience), there will come a time when he wonders what else we are lying to him about.

I have two big worries about this arrangement, though. First, I wonder how we will explain to Nate that he cannot tell other children that Santa isn't real. I certainly don't expect other parents to make the choice we're making, and I don't want my son to the the one to burst any child's Santa bubble. I figure, though, that this question could very well come up even if we were telling Nate that Santa was real, if he happened to be among the first of his friends or classmates to find out the truth.

Second, I worry that there's a chance that he'll resent not having the Santa experience if all of his friends believe in Santa. I hope that he will have enough other special traditions around Christmastime that he won't miss the guy in the red suit. I can guarantee that the child won't lack for presents, and we still plan to give him a stocking--he'll just know who the presents and the stocking actually came from. We also want to do small celebrations--probably including small gifts--for Saint Nicholas's feast day and for Epiphany. And, of course, we want to try our best to keep the focus on Christmas as a religious celebration, so that he doesn't think about it as a day that's primarily about getting gifts.

I know we can get away with not thinking about this again this year; after all, Nate will only be fourteen months old. But a friend of mine sent an e-mail this week with information about a local store that was offering free photos with Santa, and I had to explain that Nate wouldn't be sitting on the big guy's lap. It's been on my mind ever since.

Did Santa bring you presents growing up? How did you react when you found out he wasn't real? Did you learn from your parents or from a friend? How are you handling this in your family? If you're not doing Santa, have you gotten any pushback from other family members about it?

Beautiful

2010-11-11T14:12:00.003-05:00

As I put on my makeup this morning, I peered into the mirror with disdain: My pores. They were just so large. I've struggled with my skin since I was a teenager, resorting in high school to painfully drying Retin-A creams and various other potions. Things have been better since then, naturally, but I still experience what I consider to be unfairly frequent breakouts. I look gross, I thought.

* * * * *

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20a

* * * * *

Earlier this week I had lunch with a good friend who happens to be objectively stunning: Blond and thin with gorgeous features, always stylishly dressed. We lamented the state of our midsections following our respective Cesarean births, wondering whether our bodies would ever be quite the same again. I can't speak for my friend, but I know I was focused not on the miraculous way my body had carried and nourished an entire new person, but on the pouch that now makes its way over the top of my low-ish cut jeans.

* * * * *

Thank Heaven--literally--that the lesson in my Bible study this week was about cultivating inner beauty and seeing ourselves the way God sees us. How many times do I need to be reminded that external beauty is fleeting before I will stop obsessing over it? Why is it so much easier to see myself through the lens of a beauty industry that wants me to focus on my flaws--and buy their products to "fix" myself--than it is to remember that I am a precious, beloved daughter of the King of the universe?

I think of how I love Nate, and how I want him to view himself as he grows up. I don't want him to be prideful, of course, but I wish for him a quiet confidence and the sure knowledge that he is loved and treasured. How much more than any earthly parent does our heavenly Father love us and want us to feel certain of that love? How much more hurt must God be than any other father or mother when we turn our noses up in disgust at our faces and our bodies--the very faces and bodies that He created especially for us?

* * * * *

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather, he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honour since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day. Catechism of the Catholic Church 364.

* * * * *

May we ignore the voices that tell us we aren't good enough or pretty enough or thin enough or young enough. May we all look in the mirror and see instead the beauty of God's creation, giving thanks for our perfectly imperfect bodies--pores and pouches and all.

2010-11-10T14:09:00.003-05:00

One of my very least favorite questions is, "What are your hobbies?' Because the fact of the matter is that I really don't have any, and haven't since college. In high school I was involved in theater and chorus, both of which I loved. In college I took up ballroom dancing for a time, and performed with my university's then-newish Ballroom Performance Group. But since then? Meh.

Sure, I read, but I don't read enough to really consider it a hobby. I feel like to say you read as a hobby, you either need to have a specific focus (biographies, maybe, or young adult fiction, or historical novels), or you need to just be a very broad reader. I don't think chick lit plus the occasional memoir plus child-rearing books counts.

I refuse to call television a hobby, no matter how much of it I watch.

I I like wine, but I can't imagine being sufficiently interested in it to make it a hobby.

I'd like to be one of those people who enjoys cooking and baking, but truth be told my current least-favorite four words are, "Hon, what's for dinner?" When it comes to feeding us after I get Nate to bed, my only concerns are how long it will take to cook and how long it will take to clean up. (I truly do hope this changes as Nate gets older and doesn't insist on pulling everything out of the lower cabinets as I try to do anything in the kitchen.)

This state of affairs simply cannot continue. I am, therefore, making it my mission to decide before the end of the year whether I'd like to try to learn more about photography, sewing, or knitting. I want to do something that gives me tangible benefits, and these three choices fit the bill. Whether it's making Nate's Halloween costumes or knitting us scarves and hats or putting together nice albums, each of these hobbies would give my family something special. Each one also seems, for lack of a better word, attainable; I feel like I could quickly get to a point at which I would be successful with simple projects, which would help give me the motivation to continue.

Now I just need to dig around online to see where I could take a class or lessons for any of these activities, and how much the classes or lessons cost. I also need to think about materials cost. Buying a decent sewing machine, for example, seems like a biggish investment up front.

What do y'all think? Do you have hobbies you love? Am I crazy to want to take something up with an almost-toddler underfoot? If so, can I claim that my hobby is watching Glee?

Tuesday

2010-11-09T20:15:00.002-05:00

I wasted Nate's entire afternoon naptime today trying to come up with a way to accurately and adequately describe last weekend at the Blathering. I failed miserably.

Nate was fussy all afternoon, even during his playdate.

I think the switch from Daylight Saving Time, coupled with traveling to Chicago, has made me unreasonably tired. I've been fighting to keep my eyes open all day.

I made myself a cup of tea and never got to drink it.

I neglected to make any dinner at all for my poor husband, even though he was coming home from a business trip.

By all accounts, it should have been a crappy day. But this afternoon Nate decided to take four steps, smiling and reaching toward me all the way. And suddenly the rest didn't matter.

Didn't matter at all.

2010-11-08T15:10:00.003-05:00

Only a week late, a few photos from our Halloween festivities. This year was so much more fun than last year, when Nate was still just ticked off to be outside the womb. This year we were able to take him to the pumpkin patch, stroll briefly in the (huge and crazy) Del Ray Halloween Parade, and take a be-costumed Nate to see my family and some friends in our old neighborhood. We also had several dozen trick-or-treaters at the new house, and David and I enjoyed a terrific adults-only dinner with friends the night before Halloween.

I'm trusting that Thanksgiving and Christmas this year will similarly top last year. Considering that we spent much of both holidays last year holding a crying baby, the bar is set pretty low.

Hope you and yours had a spooky and spectacular time!

Visiting the pumpkin patch.

On the way to the Del Ray Halloween Parade.

Walking in the parade.

Showing off his fighter pilot costume.

Halloween night.

A snuggle beats a welcome wagon any day

2010-11-07T20:58:00.003-05:00

Miriel and I got home from Chicago this evening, and not a moment too soon, as Nate made it very clear today that he was dissatisfied by my absence. David says he was fussy, clingy, and generally unhappy all day. He's like that with me on rare occasion, if he's not feeling well or has had a really bad night of sleep. Normally, though, he's a pretty happy kid. Something was definitely up, and David is convinced Nate really wanted me.

I'm not glad Nate was unhappy today, and I'm certainly not glad David had to deal with a fussy baby. But I have to admit that it feels good to know that he really did miss me. When David comes home, he kicks and waves his arms and just looks like he's thrilled to see his Papa. Because he sees me all day every day, though, he never gets really excited when I walk into the room.

I didn't get kicking and arm waving today, either. But I got a huge smile and very eager nursing and a warm little baby falling asleep right in my arms, letting out what almost sounded like a sigh of relief.

I think that means he was glad I was home. And I'll take it.

Chi-town

2010-11-06T17:25:00.001-04:00

So, I don't feel like our neighborhood is truly suburban, and we obviously don't live in a small town or in the country. But when a come to a true city, a city like Chicago, I really do love it. There's an energy here that is unlike anything in any other environment.

I feel it a little bit when I'm in downtown DC, but DC is a strange place. For one thing, you are always as likely to run into tourists as you are to run into actual city-dwellers. And DC, in my mind, lacks the soul of a city. It is beautiful, no doubt, but there's not that same awe that comes from looking at the skyscrapers.

As we walked around, I was looking at the parents with small children in strollers, bundled up in bunting and hats and mittens. I found myself wondering what it would be like to raise a child in the city. Is it more convenient because you rarely have to deal with a car? Is it a hassle to store gear in a small apartment or navigate a stroller through crowded sidewalks? Is it easy to make friends with other parents?

We're not even going to get a chance to see the wonderful neighborhood-y areas of the city, which is a shame. It's the problem with visiting any strange city, right? It's hard to have an opportunity to really experience the place like a local. And there's not much we can do about that, given that we can't exactly move here for a few months.

I love where we live, but the problem with choosing anyplace to live is that you necessarily give up then opportunity to live any of the hundreds of other terrific places you could call home. So I will just satisfy myself with a fun visit to this terrific town, and look forward to coming back again.

Seven Quick Takes

2010-11-05T18:36:00.001-04:00

-1-
I am at The Blathering, and so far it is nothing short of awesome. So terrific to meet these ladies who I've "known" through their blogs. Can't wait to meet everyone else!

-2-
I don't think I had ever appreciated how wonderfully simple it is to fly without a baby in tow. When the flight attendant told us to "sit back and enjoy the flight," I didn't mentally roll my eyes the way I do when Nate is with me. I read my book, played with the iPad, and talked to Miriel. Bliss.

-3-
David has already tweeted that he is completely exhausted today. Heh. Welcome to my world, honey.

-4-
The nap transition is not going so well so far. Nate took one nap on Monday and one on Tuesday, but Wednesday morning he was crabby and exhausted around 9:00. I decided to put him down and give him 15 minutes to fall asleep, figuring that if he wasn't tired enough to fall asleep quickly, I would get him back up. He was asleep within five minutes. He was also tired yesterday. David gave him only one nap today, but he is definitely acting tired too early for a proper bedtime. Aha, so THIS is why everyone says that transitioning stinks.

-5-
Speaking of baby sleep, does anyone have advice for dealing with the impending time change? I am lucky in that I won't have to deal with Sunday morning, but I have no illusions that next week will be a piece of cake. I will admit that I have been dreading this for weeks. He is already such an early riser, and I have fears of 4:00 a.m. wakeups. Repeated 4:00 a.m wakeups.

-6-
Tried a decaf pumpkin spice latte for the first time today. Mmmm. Now I see what all the fuss is about. This could become a dangerous habit.

-7-
Our view? Is amazing. We are on the 33rd floor of a condo building on Michigan Avenue, looking out over the lake and up toward the Magnificent Mile. We can see the Sears Toweer (though isn't it called something else now?) and the Navy Pier. I really do like Chicago.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary, http://www.conversiondiary.com/. (I am posting from my e-mail account and can't create a word link. Darn!)

2010-11-04T21:35:00.003-04:00

Okay, posting three days in a row should be evidence that something is afoot around here. I'm attempting to participate in NaBloPoMo--National Blog Posting Month, during which bloggers post every single day all month long. I am perplexed as to why this event always occurs in November, as opposed to, say, February or March, but I'm not in charge.

Today's post will be nothing of note, sadly. It's past my bedtime, and I spent Nate's naptime packing to go to Chicago for the weekend. Can we talk, though, about that? This will be the first time I have truly been away from Nate, and it's making me pretty nervous. I am confident that I'm going to have a great time, but I'm afraid I'm going to miss him desperately. Tell me that it will be okay?

I am excited, though, that David will get to spend the entire weekend with Nate. I think he's a little worried about it right now, but he is a terrific father. Seeing that he can handle Nate all weekend can only build his confidence in that regard. He's even got a playdate planned! Nate also completely adores David, so I think he's going to be thrilled to have Papa all to himself for three whole days.

If you don't mind, though, please say a little prayer for all of us this weekend? I want everything to go smoothly here, and I don't want my missing Nate to dampen my fun. Because let's face it; mama needs a break sometimes.

Winners and losers

2010-11-03T20:34:00.003-04:00

David arrived home last night giddy with anticipation about the election returns. He was armed with a veritable score card--some pundit's predictions about key races--and we turned on CNN and ordered pizza. (Yes, we're Republicans and even we can't stand to watch Fox News.)

Obviously we're pleased with how things turned out. Oh sure, I would have loved to see Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid go down in flames. But as someone who believes the country is likely better off when the federal government is doing less, not more, I'll take a divided Congress and hope for the best in 2012.

But here's the thing. I remember going to work the day after the 2006 and 2008 elections. It was awful. And I don't mean it was awful because I was a Republican who was upset about the Democrats' gains--though I was. It was awful because in those office buildings with me were staffers who had just lost their jobs.

It was weird in the weeks after to see pallets of boxes out in the hallways, marked with a Senator's name and ready to be moved . . . somewhere. Back to the home state, sometimes, or off site for archiving, depending on the type of records. Reminders that someone is headed out the door, and taking dozens of staff members with him.

So I'm thinking today in particular of some of my committee counterparts. Their boss lost last night, and I'm wondering what they'll do next. I generally didn't agree with their boss, and I generally didn't agree with them, but I do hate it that my preferred outcome in the election necessarily causes such immediate turmoil in my former colleagues' careers and lives. It's the nature of the beast, of course, and I trust that they'll all land on their feet. But still.

It's a little thing that gets lost in the breathless twenty-four hour news coverage and the endless commentary. But as a former staffer, it's not lost on me.

Finally! A breastfeeding rant!

2010-11-02T13:30:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking an awful lot lately about . . . boobs.

I never thought I would become particularly passionate about breastfeeding. I knew I'd want to do it; it's convenient, free, and proven to be the healthiest option for babies. After struggling so long to conceive, though, and after ending up with a c-section at 42 weeks, never having gone into labor, I felt desperate for my body to do something right. I cried when Nate lost more than ten percent of his body weight in the hospital and it looked like we might have to supplement. I rejoiced when he nursed five ounces in the pediatrician's office the next morning and didn't need formula.**

Nearly thirteen months later, he's still nursing. I'm still happy about it. And I'm increasingly annoyed at a society that thinks it's fine and dandy to have breasts on display for men's enjoyment, but that nursing is somehow gross or shameful and should be hidden away from public view.

A few weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, I was scrolling through my facebook news feed when a status update caught my eye. It was from someone who is a friend of a friend, not someone I'm at all close to. "OMG!! I am sitting in church and the woman next to me is breastfeeding her baby -- and I might add with NO blanket to cover them -- ugh!!"

Immediately, I felt my blood pressure rise. Let's leave aside the fact that I have a strong feeling God is a lot more offended by facebooking in church than by nursing in church. Posted from church or from Starbucks, I was just completely offended by her comment.

The way she'd phrased it, "and might I add with NO blanket," made it perfectly clear that she would have been disgusted even if the mother had been nursing under cover. Her friends' follow-up comments did the same: One girl, for example, said that the noise babies make when breastfeeding was really what creeped her out. Am I missing something here? Does a baby sucking on a breast actually sound different from a baby sucking on a bottle? Because I have a feeling no one would have any qualms about a baby taking a bottle during church, sucking sound or not.

I left what I think was an appropriately rant-y but not over-the-top comment, noting a mother's right to nourish her child and asking whether she'd be equally offended by a woman showing excessive cleavage in public. I may also have said something about Mary nursing Jesus.

Here's the kicker, though. I had read her status and left my comment on facebook's main page, which I now realize only shows a cropped version of members' profile pictures. When I later clicked on her profile page to read follow-up comments, I saw her full profile photo--with full cleavage. As in, my husband was embarrassed to look at her photo-type cleavage.

And that's what really gets me. I would be shocked if the nursing mother who so offended my acquaintance in church was showing anywhere near as much skin as my acquaintance was displaying on her facebook page. Yet I'd be willing to wager that far more people will accept the public cleavage over the public nursing.

I don't think I'm crazy to believe that this confusion stems, in large part, from our hyper-sexualized culture. Boobs can be sexy, sure. But it seems to me that their sexiness should be reserved to the bedroom, and their functionality should take precedence wherever a baby needs to eat. As a society, we've got it backward in thinking their sexiness should be on display, while their functionality should keep mothers confined to the nursery.

Seriously, Mary did nurse Jesus. But you know what she didn't do? She didn't wear a low-cut top on facebook.

** I certainly don't want any of this to sound like I have anything against mothers who feed their babies formula. Formula-fed kids turn out just fine--David and I are two examples of that fact! I have friends who have had to formula feed due to breast infections or contra-indicated medications, or who simply couldn't deal with the hassle of incessant pumping upon returning to work. I think we should support all mothers as they do their very best for their kids. I just don't want nursing mothers to feel ashamed about feeding their babies wherever their babies need to eat.

Transition

2010-11-01T13:26:00.002-04:00

I think it's official: Nate is transitioning from two naps per day to one. Last week and over the weekend, he was taking forever to go down for his naps. His afternoon naps were awful if he'd taken a good morning nap, and he refused to take a nap at all on Friday afternoon. I have been dreading the arrival of this day, not because I think one nap is so awful, but because I hear the process of moving from two to one totally sucks.

Don't get me wrong, though--there's a lot to miss about that morning nap. Nate still gets up between 5:30 and 6:30 most days (or 5:10 this morning; dear Lord make it stop). He would nap around 8:30, so I was always just able to push my own breakfast and getting ready to his naptime. No more, friends. Now it's scarfing down a bagel while feeding bites to a clingy one year old, and blow drying my hair while he empties the bathroom drawers. Good times.

I've read a lot online from moms who moved the morning nap back by 10-15 minutes at a time, until eventually it was in the middle of the day and was the only nap. I don't think I have the patience for that, so today is Day One of my cold-turkey approach. We simply skipped the morning nap altogether, got out of the house for distraction, and then I put him down just after noon. He fell asleep almost immediately but woke up after only 45 minutes. Then, miraculously, he went back to sleep after about 15 minutes of mild fussing.

Who knows how the rest of the day will go--or the rest of the week, for that matter. He didn't get too fussy this morning, and I managed to get myself both fed and presentable while he was awake, so I am declaring success.

Any advice for dealing with this shift? Any reason to be hopeful that it will make things better? Is there even the slightest chance that sleeping less during the day will allow him to sleep later in the mornings?

Time

2010-10-20T10:13:00.005-04:00

Time likes to sneak up on you and sucker punch you when you're least expecting it.

For days I've been going through old photos of Nate and compiling them into a slideshow. I looked at them over and over without much thought, and certainly without sadness or longing.

And then today I was looking for a box of sweaters of mine that had been misplaced in the move. I'd noticed several of my favorites weren't in my closet, and I was hoping they were in a box we'd neglected to open in our rush to make the house presentable back in July before my parents came up for a visit.

I found the sweaters in the cedar closet in the basement storage room. Nestled in with my clothes, though, were a handful of Nate's fall and winter things from the coat closet. I'm not sure how his outerwear from the old entryway made it into the same box as my sweaters from two floors above, but there you go. There were the tiny hat and fleece-lined cable-knit cardigan sweater we'd run out to buy when the week he came home turned out to be unseasonably cold. The orange fleece cap with adorable little ears on top that he'd worn all fall. A cozy plaid fleece snowsuit that was too big last winter, and that I fear will be too small now.

As I turned them over in my hands, I felt the breath get sucked out of me. I've been so caught up in celebrating his first birthday and in looking at how far he's come that I've been able to push aside the concurrent melancholy at his babyhood slipping away. But this morning, in the silence of naptime, time sprung up at me from a box of sweaters. And now my heart is aching just a little.

Better Late Than Never

2010-10-19T10:27:00.004-04:00

We've been pretty busy around here with our anniversary and Nate's birthday and awesome houseguests and Nate's party and . . . in short, I'm woefully late in posting a birthday video for him. But here it is, finally.

What a difference a year makes.

Nate's First Year from Lauren Petron on Vimeo.

Music: Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World, by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Kindness in the Air

2010-09-12T15:43:00.004-04:00

Nate and I are in Michigan for a few days, keeping Arwen company while Bryan is out of town for work. We flew in yesterday, because it would be easiest to fly on Saturday, and the rates were far better, and there was hope for a relatively empty flight-- a huge plus when you'll have an eleven month old on your lap.

I saw them as I was leaving the ticket counter: a middle-aged Arab man and his wife. The wife wore a floor-length dove grey tunic, with a soft pink scarf about her head and shoulders. Only her eyes were visible, though I avoided contact with them, scurrying away toward the security gate with my son in the Ergo and my stomach slightly clenched; after all, it was September 11th, and I'd be lying if I said the sight of this obviously Muslim couple in the airport on such a somber anniversary didn't give me pause. I was flying into Detroit, and I knew that, with the substantial Arab population in the surrounding area, there was a good chance they would be on my flight.

Nate and I breezed through security (although did you know you have to remove even a baby's tiny shoes?), and I found myself wondering whether the Muslim couple would raise eyebrows with the TSA folks. I didn't know whether their undergoing a more stringent check would make me feel better or worse, so I pushed the thought away and headed for Gate 16.

I unstrapped Nate from my chest and let him crawl around near the huge windows. The gate was mercifully uncrowded, signaling a very sparsely filled flight, and within a few minutes the Muslim couple had joined the few of us waiting to board. I hung back until the other passengers had disappeared down the walkway before scooping Nate up and making my way to the boarding door.

We had three seats to ourselves, directly across the aisle from the Muslim couple. In between trying various Nate-amusement methods, my pure nosiness led me to pay them far more attention than I would have paid to your average American couple.

They carried on a lively conversation, albeit in Arabic (I think). When Muslim women's veils cover their mouths, I always get the impression of a certain muteness, as if keeping their lips out of sight somehow keeps them silent, as well. I was pleasantly surprised, then, at what sounded like a husband and wife each genuinely interested in hearing what the other had to say.

The flight attendant came by with the drink cart. He ordered coffee. She, cranberry juice.

Nate was largely content during the flight, but he'd taken two poor naps and had a bad night's sleep, so I was pulling out all the stops to keep him quiet. As I fed him snacks, produced various toys and books, and eventually pulled out the iPad to amuse him with "Peekaboo Barn," I wondered whether I looked like a stereotypical materialistic American spoiling her child.

Eventually Nate's wriggling had its intended effect, and I dropped him down to let him stand between my knees. This was insufficient freedom for him, though, and he immediately crouched to the floor and scurried out into the aisle, making a beeline for the husband's seat and reaching out to pull up on his armrest.

"Ooh, sorry," I quickly murmured, reaching down to pull him back toward me.

But the husband waved me off. "Oh, he's fine," he said, turning his attention to the baby.

I'm never one to rebuff anyone's efforts to amuse my child, so I sat back in my seat as Nate stood up triumphantly across the aisle, one hand on the man's armrest and the other patting his knee. The man reached down and gently pulled Nate into his lap, much to Nate's delight. His thick black mustache was, of course, irresistible, and Nate tugged on it with glee. The man cooed and leaned in for more; clearly this wasn't the first time he'd played this game with a little one.

"You're very kind to be so patient with him," I said, truly meaning it.

"It's nothing," he insisted, "I love children."

"Do you all have children?" I asked.

"We have three daughters, one son," he replied, as Nate giggled and marveled at this strange man and his fuzzy upper lip.

His wife leaned forward in her seat to peer around him. "Is he your only child?"

"So far," I answered. "We'd like to have more, but, you know, it's not really up to us." I gestured heavenward. The woman nodded, her eyes revealing an understanding so often absent from my secular friends and acquaintances, the ones who believe in taking hormones to prevent babies when they're inconvenient, and hormones to make babies when they're slow in coming.

After a couple more minutes, the man passed Nate back across the aisle, complimenting his sweet temper.

The short flight ended uneventfully, and I sent up a quick prayer of gratitude. I do so at the end of every flight; I mean, hurtling safely through the air from City A to City B always seems like a minor miracle.

Yesterday, though, I was grateful to have my prejudices challenged, and my presuppositions proven wrong. On the anniversary of the worst of Islamic terrorism, I was grateful for the kindness of this Muslim couple, who must feel the weight of subtle wariness like mine every day. I pray that as Nate grows up, all he sees are the people behind the fuzzy mustache and the pretty pink scarf, and that his stomach never grows nervous at the sight of them.

May we all get there someday.

Talk to me Friday morning when I'm stressing about what to wear

2010-08-25T10:36:00.004-04:00

Thank you for your comments and suggestions! I hope it didn't sound like I don't want to be friends with working mothers; that's not the case at all. I have quite a few friends from my old job who are now moms, and I only wish I got to see them more often! I just don't want to make a commitment to a regular weekend meeting/playgroup with Nate. David gets so little time with him that I don't want to take away from that, and I really just want activities to fill those weekdays.

I also wouldn't mind hanging out with a mom who was also working as a nanny, of course. I don't know if our area is unusual, but the vast majority of nannies around here are immigrants from El Salvador. (We have a huge Salvadoran population here. When David and I taught CCD a couple of years ago, 10 of the 13 kids in our class were Salvadoran.) I'm always friendly with these nannies when I see them on the playground or out at Barnes & Noble for story time, but I feel like we're just coming from very different places. Frankly, I'm not sure they'd want to hang out with me. There's a language barrier, and we don't have the same cultural references, and we just lead very different lives.

The library is a great idea. During the school year, they had a sort of sing along/story time for babies, and there were a lot of nice moms there. Unfortunately, I didn't learn about it until late in May, so I was only able to attend a couple of times before it broke for the summer. We will definitely be going back in the fall, though. One of the librarians told me that the story time for one year olds is very crowded, so we'll have to see how that goes.

I may also pick back up with a yoga or Pilates class that includes the little ones. I'd attended a mom and baby Pilates class earlier on, but because the class was for moms with pre-crawling babies, I've had to give it up as of late. I think there might be a mom and tot yoga class at the same studio that allows older babies and toddlers. The only problem is that the classes are pretty expensive, whereas playgroups are, you know, free. Free is very good in my book.

But most importantly, an update! Despite the initial request from one mom for a weekend group, it looks like things are working out for our potential playgroup to get together for the first time this Friday. Huzzah for weekdays! One of the moms is someone I've met before at the local playground and liked. Another of the moms has a baby Nate's age and nannies for a toddler, so she's bringing both her son and her charge to the group. I think I might have met her at my previous attempted playgroup, and she seemed very sweet.

Anyway, we're meeting at lunchtime, so everyone is bringing a dish to share. I'll be contributing pasta salad. I'm sure my subtle combination of penne and Italian dressing will win everyone over and make them want to see me again. Right?

Playgroup good grief

2010-08-24T14:47:00.003-04:00

I should have known it would happen as soon as I saw the e-mail.

I subscribe to an e-mail listserv for parents in my area of the city. It's been useful for various things: getting rid of our moving boxes without resorting to throwing them away, getting recommendations for classes, and the like. What it has not been useful for--and this is a surprise--is finding some small playgroup for Nate. Okay, let's be honest--finding some small playgroup for me.

At age not-even-eleven-months, Nate just isn't that interested in playing with other babies. He's happy to watch other kids, especially bigger kids, and he doesn't mind being around other babies. His actual play, though, takes place alone. I think all the experts say that, at this age, babies will play beside each other, but they won't really begin to interact in their play for several more months.

But still, I would love to get together with other moms to socialize, and just let the kids play. And I do get together with a couple of different moms on a pretty regular basis, just one on one. There's nothing scheduled or regular, though, and I sort of wish there were. What can I say? I like predictability and routine.

So yesterday when an e-mail came through the listserv from a mom looking to start a playgroup for her eleven-month-old son, I replied.

You'd think it would be a fairly simple thing to get a few moms together with their kids on a semi-regular basis for an hour or so. But there are a couple of risks involved in responding to these sorts of playgroup-formation e-mails. First, someone is always a working mom who wants to meet on the weekends. This does me no good whatsoever. On the weekends, I can already hang out with other adults, and with my husband in particular. The last thing I want to do is take away from the little bit of time that David, Nate and I can all hang out together by committing to some regular weekend playgroup.

(I would be a lot more sympathetic to the request for weekend playgroups if we were talking about older kids. Who actually, you know, play together. But I don't think baby playgroups are really for the babies themselves, but rather for the moms. And if you're a working mom, don't you already get plenty of adult interaction at work?)

Second, someone always wants to set something up during the week, but wants to send her kid to playgroup with the nanny. Again, no big deal if we were talking about lessons or team sports or something that's really and truly for the kids, but it just makes for an awkward situation when it's a small playgroup meeting in people's homes for a handful of babies who are just going to sit around and bang their own toys.

Oof. I realize how completely spoiled and snobbish this must sound, as if I don't want to hang out with working mothers or, worse, the help, but that's not it at all. What it really comes down to is this: Being a stay-at-home mom is often really lonely and really isolating. I want, nay, need some regular adult interaction during the week with people I'll enjoy talking to. Instead, my last two playgroup attempts have resulted in weekend meetings or suggested weekend meetings or offers to send a tot over to my house next time with his babysitter.

Seriously, how do you just find a little group of other moms? I feel like I will be asking for trouble if I put my parameters in a request to the listserv, but I don't know what else to do, short of crossing my fingers and hoping a small clutch of moms-of-nearly-one-year-olds falls into my lap.

What would you do?

Seven! Seven! Seven!

2010-08-19T15:51:00.002-04:00

So, Nate has one of these activity tables. He thinks it's pretty awesome, although I'll admit that I bought it on the same day that a book about Montessori education and childrearing caught my eye at Barnes & Noble. Two books and countless websites later, I'm wondering whether we should ditch all the plastic toys in favor of simple, insanely expensive wooden items. (Seriously, can someone explain to my why this thing would normally cost over $60?)

Regardless, Nate isn't all that interested in his toys right now, preferring to crawl all over the house, climb the stairs, pull up on everything, grab my cookbooks off the shelf (the only bookshelves within his reach are built into the kitchen island), and try to chew on electrical cords.

He does still play with the activity table, though. I've put it in our room so that he has a distraction while I'm putting on makeup or folding laundry. I don't find it too annoying , as far as light-up, noisemaking things go. The voices are chipper but not grating, and the little tunes are mercifully short. As he hits each button, a merry little voice rings out things like "A! B! C! Six! Eight! Star! Yellow!"

Yesterday, he must have been particularly fixated on one button, because I kept hearing, over and over, "Seven! Seven! Seven!" And the only thing I could think about was this scene from Friends:

Let's not tell Nate, okay?

On the move and in your face

2010-08-09T14:54:00.003-04:00

Nate has been crawling for about a month now, and he's hilarious. I don't know if there a sight that makes me happier than his tiny diapered bottom wiggling across the floor.

There are drawbacks to the crawling, though, like my complete inability to photograph him doing anything cute. He'll be contentedly playing with a stacker or pulling up on the coffee table, and I'll sneak over to grab the camera . . . at which point he drops whatever it was he was doing and scoots over to me as fast as his little hands and knees will carry him.

What'cha doin' over there, Mama?

What's that in your hands? Can I eat it?

Did you want to see me?

Hiya!

I can't get too annoyed, though. After all, he's still the cutest baby I've ever laid eyes on.

You can say that again.

This post is really for me: A sorry excuse for a baby book

2010-07-27T18:52:00.006-04:00

It's a funny thing, but I'm turning out not to be quite the sort of mom I'd expected to become. I thought I'd be one of those parents who bathes her child each and every day, until I discovered that it was far too much trouble to lug the baby bathtub up from the first-floor garage and the bath supplies from the third-floor nursery all to the second-floor kitchen sink (there was, of course, no place to store the necessary bath items on our old townhouse's second level). Besides, the baby didn't get that dirty.

I thought I'd have Nate in adorable little shoes every time we ventured out in public, until I learned what a hassle it is to put (and keep!) baby shoes on baby feet. Besides, it's not like he's walking anywhere. (I do attempt to put on his shoes for Mass, but all summer he's ended up kicking one or both of them off, so we parade him shoeless up through the Communion line.)

And I thought, without a doubt, that I would faithfully record each and every precious milestone in a lovely little baby book. Considering that I don't even own a baby book, it looks like that's not happening.

Still, though, I'd like to remember roughly when Nate met certain milestones, so here's my oh-so-sentimental information dump. I apologize in advance for your eyes glazing over.

Nate has six teeth. He basically cut them two at a time: The bottom middle two appeared on April 5, the day before he turned six months old. The top middle two were a bit nasty cutting through, but showed up just after he turned eight months old, one at a time. The next two out on the top surprised us the week we moved into the new house, around June 24th or 25th. The kid's got quite a bite already.

He ate his very first solid food, rice cereal, on March 28th, shortly before he turned six months old. He'd long been interested in watching us eat before that, but the weekend before had made me feel particularly guilty as he stared at each and every bit of Cosi sandwich and salad we ate. He's been a big fan of the solids ever since. He started off with bananas, sweet potatoes, and pears. He tried squash (not a fan at first), applesauce, and carrots. He became a devoted fan of YoBaby yogurt on the first try, although I quickly began cutting it with plain yogurt to reduce the sugar. He still eats lots of purees (but is not a fan of the pureed meat meals, not that I can blame him), but he loves to feed himself: Cheerios, goldfish, green peas, banana, halved blueberries, yogurt melts, puffs, scrambled egg, tiny bits of turkey burger, bagel, pizza crust, tortillas, avocado, mango, corn . . . you name it, he wants it.

He rolled over front to back on February 1, and back to front on March 18th. He started sitting up confidently on his own right around May 1. That golden era of babyhood--sitting, but not truly mobile--lasted until July 8th, when he tentatively crawled a few paces on hands and knees. Within a couple of days, he was gaining confidence, and now he motors around like it's his job. He's already into everything; if it's messy or dangerous, he wants it. The dog's food and water dishes are particularly appealing, as are all of our electrical outlets, the bathroom trash can, the dustbuster, and any drawers within his reach. He started pulling up on everything right around the same time, and now nothing in the house is safe. We've bought outlet covers, and there is a built-in baby gate at the top of the upper stairs and a door at the top of the basement stairs, but the rest of the baby-proofing feels daunting. How did you do it? What about things that can't be baby-proofed, like the dog bowls?

He generally hates the stroller, loves the Ergo, and does fine in the carseat unless he's in it for too long.

He loves it when I read him books before his naps and before bed. He stares intently at the pictures and sometimes turns the pages, and reading to him is probably my favorite part of the day. He's partial to "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and Sandra Boynton's "Doggies" (the latter because I am a particularly skillful barker).

He still puts himself to sleep, but too often wakes up before we'd like him to.

He squirms and fights me on the changing table, straining to flip himself over onto his belly and push up into a seated position.

He's obsessed with Sadie. She loves this when he's feeding her his finger foods. She hates it when he's trying to pull up by grabbing onto her fur.

He's hilarious. He's adorable. And he's growing up way too fast.

Home.

2010-07-06T13:56:00.002-04:00

So we've been in the new house two weeks as of today, and, y'all, IT IS AWESOME. We love the space, and the yard, and the light. Oh, the light! After five years in a townhouse with windows on only two sides-- and none at all in the basement-- it's a joy to be someplace so bright. Our new neighborhood is chock full of lush trees, so it's green everywhere we look. In short, it's beautiful.

The move wasn't without minor snags, of course. The biggest problem was that it took until last Saturday to get our cable and internet hooked up, and we've had the phone hooked up for less than a week. The previous owners had all three services through Comcast, and they wanted to abandon the Comcast phone service. They couldn't cut off their old service until they ported their number over to the new company, and WE couldn't set up our service until they cut theirs off, and then even once they cut off their service Comcast didn't come out to do our installation on the day they'd promised, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Casa Petroni. Perhaps by me, the one at home all day with no television or internet.

But all is well now, and the one good thing about being without telecom services is that it gives you plenty of time to unpack. Less than two weeks in, I can count on one hand the number of boxes still left to empty. We hung a bunch of pictures yesterday, and we're having three light fixtures hung tomorrow and a new dishwasher installed on Friday. (The current dishwasher is too small to wash my dinner plates. How does that happen? In our old place, we initially had a truly crappy, builder-grade dishwasher, and our plates fit without a problem. The dishwasher here was, at one time, fairly high-end, and yet it's got a totally puny interior.)

My mother keeps asking me whether the new place "feels like home yet," but honestly it's pretty much felt like home since the moment our stuff arrived. I'd been so sad about packing everything up at the old place, but once we started getting everything in boxes in earnest, it felt like a different house. I couldn't wait for moving day. I only went back over a couple of times; David and my awesome in-laws gathered up almost everything we didn't have the movers take and did most of the cleaning while I took care of Nate and unpacked over here. I was a little sad to be back there when I went, but I was so incredibly happy to be here.

I'd been worried about how Nate would react to the move, but he has been amazing. With the exception of one nap on moving day (the one time he was going to have to sleep somewhere other than in his crib), he hasn't missed a beat. I hope he will love growing up here. I get excited thinking about all the memories to be made in this house.

Yep. It definitely feels like home.

Nate Pulling Up

2010-06-11T17:29:00.000-04:00

Seven Quick Takes

2010-06-04T13:27:00.003-04:00

1. Um, did someone mention packing? Perhaps my husband? Or my mom? Or my realtor? We're moving in just 2-1/2 short weeks, and we haven't packed a thing. I am, of course, in total denial about this. I'm dreading not only the packing itself, which stinks but is totally do-able, but also the being-surrounded-by-boxes-all-day portion of the program, because I like my house neat. And I'm home all day. And did I mention there will be many, many boxes? Ugh.

2. Both closings last week went fairly smoothly (except for the part where our buyer's chosen title company almost DIDN'T GET US OUR MONEY IN TIME FOR OUR PURCHASE CLOSING), but we learned something interesting and kind of weird at the purchase closing. The family that sold us our new house has bought another house in town, and they're undertaking a massive renovation on their new house. In the meantime, they're renting a house. We found out at closing that it's the house RIGHT NEXT DOOR to their old house/our new house. They are extremely nice and all, but I the only one who thinks this is a little awkward? I'm worried that we, like, won't keep the yard up properly and they'll be disappointed in us or something.

3. We're cooking so much more since Miriel moved in, and you know what? I think we might actually be spending less on food for the three of us than we'd been spending on just David and me, because we'd been getting so much takeout for just the two of us. I haven't run the numbers, but it seems like the grocery bills aren't all that much bigger, and I know our restaurant costs are WAY down.

4. Speaking of spending less on food, I'm sort of keen to get myself better organized once we're in the new house and start meal planning based on sales, using coupons, and so forth. We're very fortunate that grocery budgeting isn't a big issue for us, so I've always just planned what I wanted for dinners all week and then bought the ingredients, regardless of price. But if I CAN save money why not? Any tips on where to find useful coupons, how to plan around sales, etc.?

5. I saw a vanity plate last week that said "H8 LWRZ." I thought it was funny (why do lawyers themselves always enjoy the anti-lawyer jokes?), but I have to wonder what happened to that guy to make hating lawyers the message he wanted to place semi-permanently on his car.

6. I was at Target earlier this week, with Nate strapped into the Ergo, and they have, like, all these adorable dresses that I want to try on! Of course, I couldn't do any trying-on with the little guy, and I don't like buying a bunch of stuff with plans to return much of it, but this weekend I will be all over it. I want to try this one, and this one, and maybe this one. Whee!

7. Can anyone give me ideas for fun things to do with a baby in the summertime? I took Nate to a park and playground today, but it was just so hot. He gets sick of walking around in his stroller pretty quickly, and it's too hot lately to walk with him in the Ergo for very long. He likes the baby swings, but they don't take up much time. I think I'm going to get him a baby pool when we get into the new house, but what else do you do with an 8-11 month old in the 90-degree heat?

More quick takes at Conversion Diary, here.

Use Your Words

2010-06-01T13:01:00.005-04:00

I don't consider myself to be a particularly good writer or blogger, as far as creativity or humor are concerned. I blame it, in part, on my legal training, and on my insistence on a certain level of precision in the language I use.

So it's with much eye-rolling and fist pounding and general frustration that I watch those people and groups who support legal abortion try to label themselves. In a piece on Salon.com today, Lynn Harris asks whether "pro-freedom" should replace the long-(mis)used "pro-choice" in the abortion debates. She theorizes that legalized abortion proponents are losing ground largely because those of us who oppose abortion have long described our position as "pro-life," and she laments her side's inability to come up with a way to be pro-some term that will trump "life."

I'm disgusted on two levels. First, I think it's condescending to assert that the American public is becoming increasingly pro-life because our side chose the better label. It reminds me of Barack Obama's claim that Americans would support his health care reform proposal if only he explained it better, not if he changed it to address their legitimate concerns. It presumes that people are stupid and just need better convincing.

More Americans are opposing abortion, perhaps, because babies born at 24 weeks gestation are surviving, pushing earlier and earlier the time when legal abortion advocates can claim that a baby isn't really a baby. (Earlier this year David, Nate, and I attended a fourth birthday party for a little girl born at 23 weeks, 6 days.) Perhaps the views that early and 3-D ultrasounds are giving us of the tiniest humans are proving to more people that an unborn child truly is a child, and not just some collection of cells. Perhaps it's that more and more of us were born after 1973's Roe v. Wade decision, and we realize it's only by the grace of God and our mothers' "choices" that we were even born at all. (Thanks, Mom!) Who knows? But I don't think it's because people like the word "life" more than they like the word "choice."

Second, though, if we're going to make this about language, I think it's completely disingenuous to try to make the abortion debate about anything other than abortion. Abortion is an ugly word and an ugly procedure, and its proponents know that as long as we're talking about what's really at issue, they'll come out on the bottom.

This isn't a discussion about "choice." I make a hundred little choices every day, and I make huge, life-changing choices now and then, and you know what? Not one single choice I've ever made has been about whether or not to have an abortion.

This isn't about "freedom" or "liberty." A liberal acquaintance once asked me how it is that in so many cases, conservatives are advocating limited government, less interference with personal freedom, but when it comes to abortion, we want the government to step in with restrictions and prohibitions. The fact that he even had to ask demonstrates how completely those who support and oppose legal abortion are talking past one another. The simple fact is that my freedom, my liberty stops where another person's begins. Those of us who oppose abortion recognize that there are two people involved in a pregnancy, and my freedom can't come at the cost of killing another innocent person. My acquaintance simply didn't see the second person, or didn't value him enough to offer him any measure of protection.

This isn't even about "reproductive rights." As a Catholic, I oppose the use of contraception, but I'm not asking the government to step in and ban its sale or use. I oppose the use of reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, donor egg and sperm, and surrogacy, but I'm not calling for their prohibition. (Although because IVF leads, in many instances, to the destruction of "excess" embryos, I'd love to see some limitations imposed on the number of embryos that clinics can create in a given cycle, and I'd like parents who undergo IVF to transfer back, over time, all of their embryos.) I oppose sterilization, but I'm not asking Congress to ban vasectomies and tubal ligations.

This is about one thing, and one thing only: Whether the government can ban killing an unborn human being where the killing isn't necessary to save the life of or legitimately protect the physical health of the mother. It's about elective abortion, that word the "pro-choicers" or "pro-freedomers" or whatever other nonsensical moniker they come up with next-ers don't want to use.

I won't insist on being called pro-life; I'll proudly embrace the term anti-abortion. Because you know what? I'm opposed to abortion. (The term "anti-choice," however, is both inaccurate and just plain stupid.) Can those who want abortion on demand to remain legal--for any reason or no reason at all--be as intellectually honest in their terminology? Can they call themselves "pro-legal abortion"? "Pro-abortion on demand"? I won't even insist that they call themselves simply "pro-abortion," in deference to those folks who claim that they are "personally opposed" to abortion, but don't want to see it outlawed. (A claim that makes me roll my eyes; how can someone truly oppose killing innocent people and not want the government to step in to protect those innocent people?)

Heck, I'd even take "pro-abortion rights" at this point. I know the term makes some people's skin crawl, because it seems to concede that there actually is a constitutional right to an abortion. I'd consider it a victory, though, just to get abortion advocates to use a term that was on point.

What's it going to be, friends? I'm pro-life. I'm anti-abortion. What are you?

In Training

2010-05-25T13:36:00.004-04:00

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing will likely depend on your point of view on such matters, but we finally had to bite the bullet and start sleep training Nate. With crying.

Dang if it isn't working like a charm.

Earlier this year, one of my girlfriends, whose daughter was born within weeks of Nate, sleep trained her baby. Well, her husband sleep trained the baby. They used Ferber and said that the first few days were bad, but the results had been astounding and completely worth it.

I never thought we'd do any sort of cry it out. If you'd asked me, I probably would have said I was actually pretty anti-CIO, and so I thought of my friend's daughter with a mix of envy over her good sleep and wariness over the means used to achieve it.

Nate has been, shall we say, widely varied in the sleep department. After he left the round-the-clock-nursing newborn stage, he would sometimes go six, seven, eight, or even nine hours before waking in the night to be fed. He has always slept in his own bassinet or crib. But we always had to rock him to sleep and then wait until he got into the middle of a sleep cycle before easing him gently into the crib, holding our breath and praying the whole time that he wouldn't wake up. He had to be swaddled to sleep, otherwise his arms would flail around and he would clutch at his face and pull out his pacifier and generally work himself into a frenzy.

His naps, with notable exception, tended to be problematic, because he'd almost always wake up after one 45-minute sleep cycle, unwilling to be coaxed back to dreamland. After I discovered that I could hold him through that first cycle and into a second to get longer naps out of him, I spent several months holding him through huge chunks of every nap.

Then he started waking up multiple times every night. If he woke after 4 a.m. or so, it was more or less impossible to get him rocked back to sleep and placed back into his crib. Occasionally I could lie down with him in the guest room and nurse him back down, but if he didn't fall asleep nursing, I was completely out of luck. As David can attest, I am not a pleasant person to be around when I've been awake since 4 a.m.

He also started rolling over from back to belly, and keeping him swaddled began to scare me. He was busting out of even the Miracle Blanket, but he wouldn't go to sleep with his arms loose, so we bought a Woombie. The Woombie kept him contained, but he seemed to be getting pretty annoyed at being able to move his arms within the blanket, but not up to his face where he wanted them to be.

He started to refuse his pacifier. Like, BOOM, he was just done with it altogether. Spit it out every time it was offered, and screamed about it, as if to say, how dare you stick that thing in my mouth?

Mostly, though, he just seemed really mad as I tried to rock him to sleep for naps, or as one of us tried with varying degrees of success to get him back to sleep at night. Clearly, the kid was tired and wanted to just be asleep already, and whatever it was that we were doing wasn't helping.

All in all, we were confounded, and frustrated, and I was beginning to dread the nighttime as much as I had in those early, sleepless months. I reasoned that if he was crying while we rocked him or held him, was it really that much different if he cried in his crib? (Obviously crying alone because he's scared or needs comforting would be something altogether different, but I trusted that we'd be able to tell the difference.)

So two Saturdays ago we set out to begin sleep training. I expected him to cry for an hour or more when we put him down that first night. This was not, I thought, a kid who knew how to just go to sleep on his own.

I'm thrilled to say that he proved he wrong.

Nate cried and fussed for about 20 minutes that first night when we put him in his crib-- unswaddled, no less. And then he WENT TO SLEEP. He woke up a couple of times through the evening, fussed for less than 10 minutes each time, and WENT BACK TO SLEEP.

We did have a nasty bout of crying after I got up around 3:00 to feed him. I changed his diaper first, then nursed him, and I think it all just woke him up too much. But he did get back to sleep, and he slept until ten after seven.

Naps have been more difficult, just like every "sleep expert" says they are. If I catch him at the right time, there is almost no fussing, but if he gets overtired at all, there are definitely tears. But here's the thing-- his crying sounds exactly the same whether I am holding him or not. I honestly believe he is upset because he is tired and wants to be asleep, and when I just get out of the way, he'll go to sleep. He still takes more than his share of one-cycle, 45-minute naps, but he's getting better and better about stretching them out, and even going back to sleep after waking up a bit. (In fact, he is in a second sleep cycle right now, after some momentary transitional noises a while back.)

PEOPLE, IT IS NO EXAGGERATION TO SAY THIS IS LIFE-CHANGING FOR ME. I have more predictable chunks of time during the day to, say, shower or eat. I know that we're not going to be running upstairs for a half hour at a time all evening to get him back to sleep. He immediately dropped from consistently eating twice in the night to only eating once, and I'm not entirely convinced that he still needs that one feeding. (He doesn't wake up crying in the night, but if he wakes and doesn't go back to sleep within 10 minutes or so at a certain point in the night, I feed him.) He is still such a lark, and often wakes around 5:40 or 5:45, but I've been waiting until 6:00 to go to him in hopes that he'll eventually stop waking quite so early.

I kind of want to smack myself in the head for being such a naysayer and waiting for so long. Perhaps it wouldn't have worked before, though, and he is just ready to sleep on his own now. I don't believe this is right for every baby, but it is working amazingly well for mine.

Now if only I could train myself to fall asleep more easily after that 3 a.m. feeding . . . .

Nate's First Pizza Crust: An iPhone Photo Series

2010-05-21T14:30:00.005-04:00

We're really enjoying trying out finger foods with Nate. Last Saturday afternoon, he tried (and loved) his first pizza crust. We figured his tummy wasn't quite ready for sausage or tomato sauce.

Mmmm. Blurry deliciousness.

Changes Abound

2010-05-19T16:31:00.002-04:00

Where to even begin? This time next Monday, David and I will no longer own our house. This time next Thursday, we will own a new house, a house we saw last year and loved and never thought we could own. We're flabbergasted.

And more than a little overwhelmed.

We're doing lease-backs on both houses into June, because our financing required us to close by June 1 but our sellers have kids in school through mid-June and can't move before then and blah-blah-blah boring property-transaction-detail-speak.

You can see photos of the new house here. Needless to say, we are thrilled that we are going to have a yard and no longer share walls with our neighbors. (Even though our current neighbors are terrific, and we'll miss them.) I was just making David's birthday trifle (Happy Birthday, hon!) and thinking ahead to how much more counter space we'll have in the new place. I was walking down to the basement today doing laundry and nearly giddy to think that the laundry will be upstairs with the bedrooms in the new place.

Oh, but the packing. I am decidedly NOT looking forward to the packing. Nor the unpacking. And you know how the house is filled with lovely, appropriate furniture in the linked photos? Yeah, when we move in it . . . won't be. At least, not for a while. But I think it's safe to say that we're both excited about undertaking decorating projects over time, and because we plan to stay in this house, um, forever, we want to take the time to do it right.

We're a little sad to leave the house we brought Nate home to, the house we became a family in. I look around at all the little things we've updated and feel a little blue about moving on. But we keep telling ourselves that we were never planning to stay in this townhouse for good, and that the sooner we are in the new house, the sooner we'll start making our memories there. The new house will be where Nate learns to crawl, where he takes his first steps, where we celebrate his first birthday and host playdates and celebrate decades of holidays. It'll be a hassle to get from here to there, yes, but it will be worth it.

We're officially insane, apparently

2010-03-11T20:58:00.003-05:00

Gah gah gah gah gah.

So, we are looking at a house on Saturday. It's a house that was on the market for months last year, went off the market for the winter, and will be back on the market soon. We went to one of the open houses while I was pregnant with Nate, and I absolutely fell in love with this place. It very close to our current townhouse, within easy walking distance to our parish. It looks small from the street (which is a plus in our book), but has a generous addition on the back with a big master bedroom, closet, and bath, and a big great room that contains the kitchen, family room, and breakfast area. It has a huge, fenced backyard with a nice wooden play gym. It has a finished walkout basement with tons of storage. It's in a neighborhood with tons of kids and a hugely popular playground.

Frankly, I have no idea why this place didn't sell last year. It was out of the question for us before we knew whether or not David would make partner. Now that he has, it's . . . a possibility. It would be a stretch, for sure. We have been planning on staying in our townhouse for at least a couple more years, so that we could save up a bigger down payment. But I can't get this house out of my head.

Are we being completely insane? David has run the numbers, and we could manage to buy this house. Townhouses in our development have been selling at pretty good prices lately, so we would probably make a decent profit selling our current place. But the new house would make things pretty tight for a while. Is it worth it to stretch for a year or two to get a house we both feel drawn to? Or is it completely irresponsible of us even to consider it?

And oh, the thought of moving. The thought of cleaning and packing and unpacking and organizing and banging my head against a wall over and over and over. I'm not even going to let myself dwell on that unless and until it is actually an issue.

But seriously, are we crazy for even considering this? Or will we regret it if we let a house we love slip through our fingers? Maybe it's providential that it didn't sell last year?

Again, GAH.

I tore myself away from him to write this

2010-03-10T16:32:00.002-05:00

My house is a lot dustier than it used to be. There is currently a heap of dirty laundry piled in my closet, and all of the bathroom trash cans need to be emptied.

I can no longer blame all of these things on needing to hold Nate during his naps. We've developed a new system, for the time being. (One thing I've learned in my five months as a mother is the impermanence of any and all situations involving the baby's behavior.) I swaddle him up, lie next to him on my bed, give him the pacifier, place my hand on his chest, and shush him quietly until he falls asleep.

The benefit of this system is that I can sneak off of the bed almost as soon as he falls asleep and gain around 45 minutes of time to do whatever else needs to be done: Feed myself lunch, do the laundry, put on makeup, catch up on TV, and so forth. When I rocked him to sleep, I had no time to do any of these things. If I put him down right away, he'd wake up. If I held him until he was deeply into a sleep cycle before putting him down, a process that took 20 to 25 minutes, I had only another 20 minutes or so to myself before he'd almost inevitably wake up as he transitioned from one sleep cycle into the next. That's how I ended up holding him through naps; I discovered that I could sometimes rock him through the transition, then put him down, and then get an hour or more of naptime out of him.

As he began waking more and more frequently after one sleep cycle, even with my holding him, I decided there had to be a better way. Hence the new method.

Problem is, even though I CAN sneak off of the bed right away, I find time and again that I am drawn to his sleeping side. On some days, I can drift off for a nap right next to him, and there is nothing more delicious than napping with your baby. Other times I just can't tear myself away from staring at the way his lashes fall on his adorably chubby cheeks, from watching the soft rise and fall of his tiny chest, from sniffing his silky head of baby hair.

He is five months old already. Five months! He rolls over so easily now that I can't keep him on his tummy. He sits up holding only onto one of my fingers. He loves to shove anything and everything into his mouth, most especially David's or my hands, noses, chins, or shoulders. He jumps with glee in his Jumperoo. He grins like mad and bounces around when I turn on music for him.

Arwen and Blaise were down to visit for several days last week, and Blaise is walking. He's climbing stairs. He has learned the sign for "please" and uses it upon request. He's a toddler! (An adorable one, of course.) And all of these behaviors are mere months away for Nate. Before I know it, he won't be the little guy who demands that I hold him all the time, who wants nothing more than to have me smile at him and kiss him over and over. He'll be crawling, then walking, away from me, more interested in discovering the world than in patting my face with his tiny hands.

And so my coffee table is dusty. My bathtub is filmy. My duvet cover needs laundering. Maybe I'll take care of these things soon, but maybe not. I'm too busy drinking in the peaceful, sleepy moments with my beautiful little guy.

Nate Laughing

2010-02-22T16:56:00.001-05:00

Nate gets ashed

2010-02-17T13:09:00.004-05:00

We survived our first solo Mass! My friend Kate was there with her adorable little guy, so I wasn't totally alone with Nate. The babies were pretty good; we had to take them out some, but no screaming or real crying. Huzzah!

Winter Blues

2010-02-04T15:37:00.002-05:00

I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed and down in the dumps lately. January, thankfully, brought visits from my dear sister and from Arwen's dear sister, otherwise I'm not sure I would have made it through the month sane. February threatens to do me in, what with the snow coming AGAIN and the COLD and my complete and utter inability to go anywhere before Nate needs to be down for another nap.

Oh, the napping. It generally occurs only in my arms, and please don't lecture me about how I am spoiling my child. I don't believe a baby can be spoiled, but I certainly believe he can become accustomed to having things a certain way, and I am all too aware that he is accustomed to napping in my arms. He's in the crib right now, after I held him for just over an hour, and I am nearly giddy with the thought of having a few minutes to myself. I know we are going to have to start putting him down "awake but drowsy" for naps, but I dread what will happen when I undertake that project. His nighttime sleep is far from perfect, but it has been much better (in general) than in the past, and I fear screwing up the nighttime sleep if he doesn't get adequate naps.

I keep telling myself that things will get better in the spring, when we can get out of the house for walks with far more regularity. (Poor Sadie will be grateful, too. David looked at her the other day and asked whether she had put on weight. I fear that she has, because we don't get her out nearly enough these days and compensate for our guilt with table scraps.) But I don't want to go through Nate's babyhood always looking forward to the next phase. He's so sweet and adorable RIGHT NOW. He prefers me to any other person in the world. He loves to look around at everything going on around him. He smiles all the time. He laughs. He babbles to us. He grabs his toys and wants to put everything in his mouth. He lights up when I sing to him. Seriously, how can I not be perfectly content with things just the way they are?

Perhaps it's because I'm still so tired. Certainly it's because I so rarely get to see other adults. I had lunch last week with some girlfriends from the Hill, and a couple of them are moms who work outside the home. I had Nate with me, and I was slightly envious of their ability to enjoy their lunches without bouncing their babies in a sling, dropping food all over him, and worrying about whether he was going to start fussing any second. I absolutely don't want to go back to work, but I do envy their time in the adult world.

I'll tell myself, though, that they envy me in some ways, even if my days are an endless string of sameness. They may get plenty of validating grown-up interaction while I hold my baby for yet another nap. But I get to smell his sweet baby hair and watch his tiny lips purse or break into one of those funny sleeping smiles. They may have lunch in restaurants regularly, but Nate gets his lunch straight from me, all the time. I know it is a huge blessing to be able to stay at home with Nate and spend so much time with this amazing, hilarious, constantly-changing little person. And on days when that doesn't feel like enough, I'll remind myself that spring really is just around the corner.

Nate learned a new trick today . . . .

2010-02-01T19:10:00.000-05:00

Seven Quick Takes

2010-01-15T16:31:00.002-05:00

1. Nate is taking his second two-plus hour nap of the day, which is a miracle in and of itself. Detracting only slightly from the miraculous nature of this feat is the fact that I had to hold him for more than an hour and a half of each nap. Sometimes when one of us holds him for this long (an hour or more), we get at least another hour's worth of nap out of him. On such occasions, we feel like Parenting! Superstars! Look at all the time we suddenly have to clean/do finances/watch TV/eat/pee. Other times, he wakes up even when we are holding him. On these occasions, we're so let down. And yet we persevere, because when we DON'T hold him initially, he almost ALWAYS wakes up at 30 or 45 minutes, and we love the kid enough to want him to get some decent sleep.

2. David and I have a date on Sunday. It's not my top choice for activities--we're going to a Washington Capitals hockey game-- but it's a date nonetheless. With a meal beforehand! In a real restaurant! The paternal grandparents will be in town and have agreed to watch the little guy (as if that took SO MUCH arm twisting). I think it will be the longest I've been away from Nate since he's been born, which makes me a little anxious. But it'll be fun, right?

3. David just criticized the spaces I initially stuck after the double dashes in the previous Take. He says I don't need them following an em dash. He is a complete grammar nerd, even moreso than I am. (By the way, it's really hard to break the habit of hitting the space bar after the dashes if that's what you're used to doing.) (Also, I just told David that this was the most boring Take ever, but he's convinced that Arwen and Miriel will appreciate it.)

4. Nate had his "two month" well-baby visit last Monday, a mere two days before he turned three months old. I was initially annoyed that we couldn't get him in earlier (and his "four month" visit will occur on March 4th, only two days before he's five months old). Now, though, I realize that it's no big deal, and perhaps actually a good thing to have a little more time before each round of vaccines. He weighed 13 pounds, 5 ounces, and was 24 inches long, with a head circumference of 16 inches. That put him in the 50th percentile for height and weight, and only the 30th percentile for head circumference. It's a good thing we know that intelligence is not related to head size, or else we'd be worried.

5. We rearranged our living room to make more floor space available for Nate to play, and I am LOVING the new arrangement. Seriously I wonder why we didn't do this ages ago. I think I'd prefer it this way even sans baby. We moved the sofa over to one side and got a much smaller coffee table, and the whole thing just feels so much more open. (Probably because it , um, IS so much more open.) The couch no longer faces the TV head-on, but that doesn't bother me in the least. Frankly, I'm not sure how much we'll be able to have the TV on going forward; Nate is so attracted to the bright lights! moving pictures!, and I don't want him watching TV for a long while.

6. I know I've sung the praises of my iPhone before, but it bears repeating: I am not sure how I would be getting through these days without it. During the three-plus hours I spent holding Nate for naps today, I listened to a Faith & Family Live! podcast, listened to music, surfed the internet, checked and composed e-mail, kept up with facebook and Twitter, finished reading one novel, ordered a new book, and read Morning Prayer. We realized last night that we're quite certain the iPhone is a more powerful computer than my college desktop. So weird! And thank goodness.

7. David just informed me that these quick takes weren't actually quick at all. So this one will be. The End.

More quick takes at Conversion Diary, here.

Because the grandparents love this kind of thing

2010-01-13T11:11:00.001-05:00

Playing with Photo Booth

2010-01-11T13:56:00.002-05:00

Just because.

Wow, I'm dumb

2009-12-30T15:42:00.001-05:00

All this time I have been sitting at night and for nap after nap
holding Nate and my iPhone, lamenting the fact that I couldn't update
the blog easily from the phone. But OF COURSE I CAN. There's a way to
do it easily! So now I know that I can update straight from my email
account on the phone. I don't know yet how the formatting will work,
but I figure even lame formatting isn't as lame as a complete dearth
of posts.

So, the holidays with a baby are, shall we say, DIFFERENT. I look
forward to the day when Nate eagerly anticipates Christmas morning or
Thanksgiving dinner or opening the tiny doors of an Advent calendar.
This year, though, I was just happy when he wasn't fussing. And yet
I'm just so dang grateful for the kid! My favorite moments were
atypical-- my first nightwaking with him on Christmas morning, closing
my eyes and trying to imaging Mary holding a tiny newborn Christ
child, walking back to my pew after Holy Communion at Christmas Eve
mass with tears in my eyes as Silent Night played, or just enjoying
the glow of the Christmas tree as I nurse Nate. The meals, the gifts,
were honestly kind of stressful, as I bounced Nate and tried to eat or
admire gifts or worried that Nate's eventual crying was annoying
everyone else.

Ah, well. There's nothing to be done about it with an almost-three
month old. Next year I'm sure there will be a new challenge, like
trying to keep him from breaking/eating/throwing the ornaments.

I'll take chaotic holidays with this little man over picture perfect
ones without him. No question.

Sleepy

2009-11-20T10:46:00.004-05:00

Exhaustion has set in. Utter, complete, mind-numbing, soul-crushing exhaustion. I wasn't this tired during law school finals. I wasn't this tired in 2007 when I was working until all hours in the Senate on the immigration bill. The only thing that even comes close was one hellish month in private practice, but even that doesn't really compare. Any time I've been sleep-deprived before-- due to work or studying-- there were two significant differences. First, there was always a fixed end date in sight, after which I knew I was going to be able to catch up on my sleep. Second, even during those difficult times, I would get bigger chunks of sleep than I'm getting now-- and could even break down and sleep a good, full night if I really needed to.

I'm going on seven weeks now during which I've strung together three to four hours of sleep at a time at the most. I think that ONCE, MAYBE there was a five-hour stretch, but that was early on and has not been repeated.

Nate does not like to sleep at night, and I don't know what to do about it. He used to do a pretty decent four-hour stretch before his first night feeding, and a couple more hours after that. Now, I'm lucky to get three hours in a row for that first stretch, and it's only downhill from there. Last night I went to bed at 9:30, only a few minutes after Nate. He was up at 12:30, nursed, down at 1:18, up at 3:37, nursed, down at 4:21, up at 4:34 (when I begged David to get him back to sleep, because I knew he wasn't hungry), down at 4:53, and up for the day at 5:30. It's currently 11:00 a.m., and he's finally been napping for an hour.

Of course, now that he's napping, I feel like I SHOULD be trying to sleep. But yesterday morning I spent his entire morning nap frustrated on the couch, trying to doze off. I think the pressure to "sleep when the baby sleeps" can be too much. Sometimes I'm better off just doing something else-- surfing the internet, reading a magazine, calling a friend-- because I feel like I've just wasted my little free time if I try to sleep and can't. I can sometimes fall asleep during a later nap, but if I'm home alone with him, I'm invariably up after only an hour.

He used to love to take crazy-long naps during the day-- three and four hours at a time. Then I began to worry that he had his days and nights mixed up, and so I've started waking him after two to two-and-a-half hours. We've also stopped leaving the lamp on in the nursery, after reading that even a dim bulb could make him wake up more at night. He does seem to fall back to sleep easier after his first feeding now, but he still wants to be awake anytime he finishes a feeding after 4:00 or 4:30 a.m.

I'm not a nice person when I'm sleep-deprived. I've probably snapped at David more times in the past four weeks than in the previous four years. I know there's no way to put a six-week-old on anything resembling a schedule, but I'm going insane. I need help from any veteran moms out there. (Ellen, I'm looking at you!!) Am I right to wake him up if his daytime naps get too long? Should we try to get him down at a certain time each night? (Right now it varies because he gets fussy in the evening and ends up taking a nap.) Any way to get him to sleep a little bit later in the mornings? (I'm a morning person, so 6:00 or 6:30 would seriously be a fine wake-up time in my view, provided I could actually get some decent sleep before then.)

Even if there's nothing I can actually DO right now, can anyone tell me when it might start to get a little bit better??

Finally! Pictures from Nate's baptism.

2009-11-10T11:49:00.000-05:00

Go take a look here.

One Month Old!

2009-11-07T13:01:00.003-05:00

Nate was one month old yesterday!! It's hard to believe it's already been a month. Wasn't I just responding "five days old" or "eight days old" when people asked me how old he was?

He has changed so much already. He's outgrown most of his newborn clothes, but it's been fun to start using the (far more abundant) 0-3 month sizes. It's so sad, though, to set aside the tiniest outfits, knowing that he will never wear them again. He genuinely smiles at us already, and he can focus on our faces and track a toy with his eyes. His neck control is terrific already, which makes my life a lot easier-- he makes me carry him up over my shoulder a lot, so it's important that I have a free hand to feed myself or carry his bouncy seat up and down the stairs (and up and down and up and down).

He's still completely unpredictable in so many ways, though. While I'm sure that's totally normal, it's nonetheless frustrating. He'll have one excellent day of sleep-- multi-hour naps and happiness all day-- followed by a completely cranky, sleepless day. We haven't been able to figure out what causes the good or the bad days, although it becomes clear early in the day what kind of day we're facing: A good early nap leads to a good day, while a short or absent early nap spells disaster. The question is how to induce the early nap on days when he fights and fights against it or wakes up after only a few minutes.

We're finding our feet, though, and we are both already so much more confident than we were only a few short weeks ago. I can't wait to see how we feel in another month!

Phoning it in

2009-11-04T13:00:00.006-05:00

Of all the things that have surprised me so far about parenthood, perhaps the strangest is the extent to which I have become utterly and completely dependent on my iPhone.

I've had the phone for about 15 months, and I've always loved it. I began to love it even more when I stopped working and rid myself of the Blackberry, slimming my purse down to one device for phone, e-mail, internet, and music. I've watched movies on plane trips on the phone, used it countless times for directions, and it even served as our sole internet access last spring during our trip to Harbor Springs with the Moshers. (We all passed it around to get a tiny information fix!)

Since Nate has been born, though, it's felt like my lifeline. First of all, we downloaded an application when he was born that keeps track of all his vital information-- diaper changes (too many to count), feedings (frequent), sleep (not nearly enough), baths (not as many as I would have anticipated), tummy time (when I remember to do it), and so forth. This means that I have the phone with me pretty much at all times, so that I can always start his feeding timer or record a diaper change.

Second, there's the Kindle app. David gave me a Kindle for my birthday, which is terrific. (I'd determined that it would be far easier to read on the Kindle-- with only one hand-- while holding a baby, instead of trying to awkwardly hold a book and turn pages with Nate in the other arm.) The iPhone syncs up with the Kindle so that you can read any of your Kindle books on the phone. Because I already have the phone with me at all times, I've just been reading on the phone instead of on the Kindle.

The Kindle books, along with Twitter and Google reader (on the phone's internet browser), have been my sanity during those nighttime feedings. I'm even on the verge of renting a couple of movies through iTunes to watch at 2:00 in the morning when my eyes are too bleary to read. I could, I suppose, come downstairs and turn on the laptop or television, but that makes it feel even more like I'm "up" than sitting in the nursery does. So far it's much nicer to sit in the fluffy nursery glider/recliner and thumb the phone while Nate nurses.

Who knew this little gizmo would be my saving grace in these early weeks? And what on earth did new moms do before they had technology to keep them company when the rest of the world is asleep???

Election Day!

2009-11-03T13:01:00.003-05:00

It's election day in Virginia! We're pretty excited, because it looks like our candidate for governor is actually going to win this time.

Nate knows who he'd vote for (if he could vote, that is).

Bottled Up

2009-11-02T17:48:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was a big day in the Petroni household. I conquered my fear of the pump, and David got to feed Nate for the first time. It was strangely bittersweet for me. On the one hand, I was thrilled-- this development means the prospect of girls' night with friends, a dinner out with David, and the hair appointment that I already pushed back once to November 18th. On the other hand, it was pretty strange to see Nate getting his nutritional needs met by someone other than me. (Although I did still supply the nutrition. But you know what I mean.)

David has not been putting any pressure on me at all to pump so that he could feed Nate, thankfully. I've heard horror stories of husbands and grandparents pressuring a mom to pump so that they could "participate in feedings." Forget that, I say. I'll pump when it's needed and helpful, not so that anyone else gets the joy of giving my child a bottle.

Problem is, even after he sucked down 3.8 ounces from a bottle, Nate still wanted to comfort nurse. I guess that cold, hard plastic just isn't as nice as soft, warm mom flesh. We're still trying to figure out how we'll deal with that issue. Perhaps he'll just get used to having a bottle here and there? Could he have been dissatisfied because he knew I was in the room, and if I'm truly unavailable he won't fuss for me? Anyone with experience in this area?

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T21:12:00.002-04:00

This year we got the best treat of all!

2009-10-28T17:16:00.003-04:00

Wow. So the past three weeks have been a complete blur. For the first four days after Nate was born, we were at the hospital. For days 5-13, David was at home with me. Days 14-18, David's mom was here. Days 19-23 (today), my mom and sister were here. It was a strange feeling to drop them off at the airport earlier this afternoon. I looked in the rearview mirror at the blurry plastic "mirror" that gives me a distorted view of Nate in his rear-facing carseat and realized that we were on our own for the first time.

It's overwhelming, but also exciting. I've LOVED having so much help these first few weeks, but you necessarily do things differently when other people are in the house. For Nate's first post-company diaper change, I turned up the clock radio in his nursery, put my face down near his, and belted out some Taylor Swift to get him to stop crying. Surprisingly, it worked.

I've been unable to bring myself to sleep during his long afternoon nap today, because it's far too tempting to flit around the house putting everything back in order. I'm sure I'll need the nap tomorrow, but I just couldn't do it today.

Nighttime is interesting. I dread-- absolutely dread-- getting out of bed and stumbling to the nursery to feed Nate. We had a cold snap last week, which made it all the worse to climb out from under the warm covers. (Will I have to sleep in sweats in the winter just to make it bearable??) But once I'm sitting in the soft light of the nursery with Nate snuggled against me, it's all somehow okay. It's at night when I look at his tiny hands and feet and nuzzle his soft head and wish that he could stay this tiny and snuggly forever.

Nate was baptized on Saturday. You can read Arwen's beautiful post about the occasion here. I thought I would be in tears throughout the baptism, but in the end I was too aware of being up in front of everyone to end up too weepy. It was only when I turned away from our family and friends and closed my eyes to receive the mother's blessing that I finally welled up. It's been a long road to get here, and sometimes I still can't believe this tiny, perfect little guy is with us. What a blessing.

Nathanael Sherer Petron

2009-10-17T11:22:00.004-04:00

So, the parenthood thing. It's time-consuming. So time-consuming, apparently, that we've been unable to update the blog with the best news of our lives.

Nate was born at 1:41 p.m. on Tuesday, October 6. He weighed 9 pounds, 2 ounces, and was 21 inches long. He nurses like a champ and is the most beautiful baby we've ever seen-- not that we're biased or anything. He's charming everyone he meets and has his parents wrapped around his little finger.

We were in the hospital from Tuesday until Friday evening. The hospital stay definitely had its ups and downs, and we were grateful to get home. At home, no one yells at me if I pull Nate into bed with me when he's fussy at night. At home, we don't have random hospital staff dropping by our room at 3:00 in the morning to draw our son's blood. At home, David has a comfortable bed to sleep in and comfortable chairs to sit in. Of course, at home we don't have nurses available 24 hours a day to answer any questions we may have.

We've been doing really well, though. David has been home all week with me, and no one could take better care of me than he does. We've had abundant meals provided by friends and family. (I'm a bit ashamed to say that we've eaten far better since Nate's birth than we did during most of my pregnancy.) We've managed to shower regularly and get a fairly decent amount of sleep, considering that we're dealing with a newborn.

We want to find the time to post a full birth story. I had wondered in some ways whether I'd want to post one at all, considering that I didn't experience labor or what I'd always viewed as "real" childbirth. But our story is ours, and it was truly amazing, despite its distance from our initial plans. Every time I think about or talk about hearing Nate cry for the first time I get weepy. It was probably the best moment of my life.

For now, just know that we're doing well, better than I could have anticipated. We're in love with this little guy and can't wait to share more.

The Finish Line

2009-09-30T18:30:00.002-04:00

The good news is that the baby will be in our arms by this time next week, come hell or high water.

The bad news is that it doesn't look likely that he'll arrive in the manner we'd so hoped for.

We trekked out to see my doctor once again yesterday, less than a week after my last appointment. I was officially 41 weeks pregnant, and it was time for a fetal non-stress test. The little guy passed with flying colors, showing off his beautiful heartbeat with no decelerations and enough movement during the test to make the doctor very happy.

It was also time for another progress check, though, and apparently my body thinks "progress" is a dirty word. The baby is still too high up; I'm still not dilated at all; and things just aren't softening up to make way for the wee one.

The doctor we saw yesterday was unhappy that last Thursday's doctor had not scheduled an induction-- not because he thought it was likely to work, but rather just to get it on the books (even if it wasn't scheduled until after I'd reached 42 weeks). He basically gave us three choices: (1) schedule an induction for sometime this week or very early next week; (2) schedule a c-section for anytime this week or early next week; or (3) schedule an induction for next Wednesday or Thursday, but also schedule another non-stress test for Monday.

We talked a lot about induction and how likely it was to work. David and I are familiar with the concept of a Bishop score and which factors indicate that an induction is likely to be successful. My Bishop score right now would be, um, a 3. Or even a 2, if you subtract a point for the fact that I've never delivered a child. In other words, if we were to attempt an induction right now, or before my body and the baby had made some significant progress, the induction would most likely fail. My body has not made a lick of progress in four weeks.

We've been hoping and praying all along to avoid a c-section. But, the thing I want even less than a c-section is an emergency c-section after a failed induction. It's my personal opinion that a woman should only have to endure the pain of labor OR the pain of recovery from a surgical birth-- not both. Every woman I know who has had to go through both says it's absolutely the worst in terms of exhaustion, disappointment, and stress.

For us, this just meant induction was off the table. If my body were already moving in the right direction and were favorably predisposed to be induced, we would feel differently. But we don't want to set ourselves up for failure. And both our doctors and our guts tell us that's what we would be doing if we decided to induce.

Instead, we decided to schedule a c-section for next Tuesday, October 6th. We gave my body another week to get its act together and pushed it all the way back to the 42-week mark, but we now have an end date in sight. By next Tuesday morning, one way or another, we'll get to meet our son.

I'm really trying to be completely okay with our decision. I guess I'm okay with the decision, but I'm still really frustrated with the situation. I never wanted to need to schedule a c-section. I am totally comfortable with choosing a scheduled section over what I truly believe would be a failed induction; that's not the issue. I'm just disappointed that, once again, my body can't seem to do the very things it's supposed to do. I'm disappointed at the thought that I won't get to hold my baby before anyone else. I feel like I'm being robbed of a truly life-changing experience. I'm anxious about how hard the recovery will be and how very, very much I will need to rely on David and on other people for those initial days and weeks at home. I'm worried that a surgical delivery will somehow impact our son's health or my ability to nurse.

Still, I'm trying to look on the bright side. We know what to expect and when to expect it. We'll skip right over labor. The surgery will not be rushed, and there will be no risk that it will need to take place under general anesthesia (a fear I'd had about a planned med-free birth turning into an emergency c-section).

And, of course, the biggest bright side of all: Finally holding our baby, the baby we thought would never come. Surely, surely that bright side can outshine my fears, worries, and disappointment. Right?

Dear Baby,

2009-09-25T16:19:00.004-04:00

You remember a few weeks ago when I was all sentimental about your last few days/weeks at home in my uterus? And how I was still all wistful about it and not sure that I could face the end of your time there?

Those days are gone, little dude. Getoutgetoutgetoutgetoutgetout.

Seriously. It's now three days past your due date. Everyone and their brother is driving me batty with the incessant "any baby news?" questions. (Do people honestly think I'm going to sneak off and have this baby and NOT TELL THEM or something?) I wake up multiple times each night to heave myself out of bed to empty my poor squashed bladder, or to throw myself from one side to the other in futile search for some relief for my aching hips. I arose Thursday morning to find your dad in the guest room, unable to withstand my thrashing about any longer.

I'm not sure what you've now decided to do to my tailbone, but it's now painful for me to walk at all. I'm sitting like a lump around the house unable even to distract myself with small chores and errands.

Yesterday's doctor's appointment revealed that my body is making essentially no progress toward moving you out. No dilation at all; 70% effacement. I wouldn't have wanted the doctor to start pushing for an induction, but I still found it a bit disheartening when he told me that he couldn't talk induction dates because I wasn't even ready to respond favorably. He did say that it would be good for me to try to continue walking a lot, but this new tailbone ache has made that essentially impossible.

The doctor also sent us yesterday for an ultrasound to check the position of my placenta, which had previously been too close to your exit for comfort. (Well, for my comfort. The OB who would have needed to refer me for a follow-up ultrasound was confident it would move away.) I was thrilled for the chance to see you again, and relieved that we'd get some real confirmation that your pathway was unobstructed.

The good news was that your route is clear. The bad news-- well, I see it as bad news-- was that you're already estimated to weigh 8 pounds 11 ounces.

I know those ultrasound weight measurements are notoriously inaccurate, but I'm still trembling in fear and questioning my ability to birth you drug-free. And the longer you camp out in there, the bigger you're going to get. So seriously, kid, getoutgetoutgetout.

I had three friends who were all also due in September. Not only have their babies all arrived, but they all arrived obligingly early. Early! The same way I, your loving mother, arrived a polite ten days before my due date. I see, though, that you're already taking after your father, who kept his dear mom waiting for a full three weeks past her due date.

Let me tell you, kid, they don't let that happen anymore. They'll cut you out of me at least a week before that, and that really wouldn't be best for either of us. Especially for me. Not to sound selfish or anything, but I'd be the one, you know, sliced open.

So, please, will you come on out and join us? We have had everything ready for you for weeks now. Everyone is anxious to meet you, as evidenced my the aforementioned incessant baby update demands. Don't make me nuttier than I already am.

Love,

Your adoring mother (who really, really, just wants to see you and hold you and kiss you and begin a lifetime of doting on you . . . and who also really wants to sleep on her back again)

Fleeting

2009-09-08T10:51:00.003-04:00

One of my girlfriends is due the day after I'm due. We've been having a lot of fun being pregnant at the same time, and it's been great to have someone close by who is going through exactly the same things at the same time.

She had maternity photos taken last Thursday. I could have gotten in on a session if I'd wanted to; the photographer is taking (very reasonably priced) newborn photos for both of us after the births, and she would have taken pregnancy photos for me on the same day she drove to Virginia from her home up in Maryland. I declined because I've never been a big fan of those big bare belly pictures. I didn't think there was any way I'd want to display such photos in our house (and I certainly wouldn't have wanted any of our family members to display them, not that they would likely have been interested themselves), and I figured it wasn't worth the expense if I wasn't going to, you know, use the photos anywhere.

Now, I'm doubting myself. Throughout this pregnancy, I've been balancing two emotional states. The first, of course, is immense gratitude. This baby is so wished-for, so long-anticipated, and such a little miracle that everything about him and about the pregnancy just fills me with joy.

The second, though, is bittersweet. This feeling hits me now and again, and almost always at unexpected times. It's a fear that I'll never get the chance to experience any of this again. It's the thought that I should be extra sure to enjoy every milestone, because it could be the only one of its kind.

I feel a bit lucky, both as a Catholic and as a person who has experienced infertility, that I have a keen awareness of the pure gift that our fertility really is. Obviously any pregnancy could be a woman's last, and through no desire of her own. But far too many couples are unaware that they are not in control; they view their fertility as something they own, something that can be turned on and off like a faucet. I have no such illusions. And while I'm grateful for knowing the truth, it does hit hard at times.

It's been particularly acute in these waning weeks of the pregnancy. I feel my son squirming around in my belly and jump quickly from thoughts of hey kid, quit kicking my ribs to will I ever feel another baby growing inside me? I have to be very careful, because the last thing I want is to lose any tiny bit of the joy of this pregnancy, this child's babyhood, his milestones, because of fear that I may not see such things again.

I almost hesitate to mention any of this at all, because I know how I would have felt had I read similar thoughts before this long-awaited pregnancy. I know how incredibly blessed we are. I know that even one child is far more than I-- than any of us-- deserve. I know that this is pure gift, and I thank God every day for it. But still. There's a little part of me that's wistfully wishing I'd had a photographer capture this fleeting and joyous state, even if no one ever saw the pictures but me. As much as I can't wait to meet our baby, I'm feeling the need to hold tightly to these last precious moments where he is hidden away, all mine, a squirmy little rib-kicking, heartburn-inducing miracle.