Anticipate your belated Christmas card
We are back from Christmas vacation. There were definitely some low points (six-month-old’s impacted stool topping that list — Christmas morning, natch) but it was just so nice to relax and hang out with our families. I returned to B-more feeling more rested, less anxious, and actually excited for the future. Whee!
Hope your holidays were super rad. We are going on a nacho run and settling in for a long night of The Simpsons Movie and the first two seasons of ‘Extras’ to ring in the New Year — Happy 2008!
A cheerful, shallow pause in the slump
Went to the old Franklin Park Mall today with my sister and my brother’s girlfriend. Exchanged a Gap turtleneck for a really sweet pair of dark jeans … in the next size down! Score one for the intestinal disease, I’m now a size two again.
After that we unpacked our suitcases and moved in to Sephora. I had two gift cards to spend and, after like an hour wandering around wide-eyed, walked out with the Bare Minerals starter kit. My sister Em let me try hers yesterday and you know what? I’m a convert. I look smooth and glowy. I’m wearing that and the eye kit right now. And my new vest. I am Hot Mom, hear me purr.
Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.
A very premenstrual Christmas
Happy Holidays from the girl crying in the corner!
We’re all lodged at my parents’ home, the Midwestern ancestral estate, playing Wii bowling and getting on each other’s nerves a little bit. I’m still feeling like shit, plus riding some sort of post-weaning hormonal roller coaster, plus looking at this Low Residue Diet that does not include a proviso for chocolate. Fucking chocolate and it’s fucking stomach-irritating potential.
But all is not woe and drama. I have taken a nap every day since we got here. I have half a dozen siblings and siblings’ boyfriends to play with my children (“RAYGUNS!”). I have been reading Gossip Girl and totally not even hiding it. There are piles of sugar cookies laying around and a hot tub calling my name.
But if Santa skips our house this year, I’ll bet you it’s because of the flabby moody hairy intestinally-distressed woman crying in the jacuzzi out back, she scared him off.
Merry Christmas, Supa friends! I’ll report back later once my mood stabilizes and I have lovely pleasant things to say.
Oscar Mayer Weaner
It’s official. I breastfed Cormac up to his six-month birthday, but now that part of our mama-baby relationship is over. I feel a little sad but also a little relieved.
Mac has always been a food-fighter; I feel like almost every session was a wrestling match. He would chew and grab and wrench and twist and arch and scratch and pull and claw and slap. He does the same thing with the bottle, but at least the bottle is not connected to my body. I feel confident that I gave him a very good start in life. I am proud that I stuck it out through the hard parts at the beginning and proved to myself I could do it.
But I also know, having raised Owen so far, that breastfeeding is really a small part of motherhood. At least for me. Such a small part of my children’s lives, overall, never a guarantee of anything. It had wonderful moments, but sharing the feeding with his father is wonderful, too. Feeling my body return to it’s normal state is wonderful, too.
It was a very slow weaning process, so I am not uncomfortable. No need for cabbage leaves or Tylenol. I’m glad for that; abrupt weaning is not for the faint of heart. I finally stopped because Mac was getting upset and confused at not having booby on demand.
The process started a month ago, when I had to start a course of antibiotics to treat what the doctor thought might be a stomach infection. I had to bottlefeed Mac and pump the breastmilk, which is a miserable thing to do, especially if you have a hand pump and not a fancy electric jobby. My supply plummeted for those 9 days. Never got back up. I decided to tough it out to six months, which was my main breastfeeding goal, and I did: that was December 8th. We were down to one or two sessions a day, and I let that peter out a few days ago.
Now that my doctor has found what he expected to find — evidence of a chronic, inflammatory autoimmune disease that should be manageable with pills — I will most likely be put on medication that isn’t compatible with nursing. So ends my one and only successful run at breastfeeding; it felt like a momentous enough occasion to highlight here.
OK, fine. I will miss it a little bit.
In honor of my doctor’s looky-loo today
My friend Kristin told me to tell him that the camera adds ten pounds. Hee.
R.I.P., ‘Blueprint’ (and ‘Sassy’, and ‘Jane’ …)
She wants what I want.
I have no idea what I’m trying to say, just that I miss loving a magazine as much as I loved the few years of Sassy I was old enough to find relevant, I wish I had saved my old 90’s Seventeen magazines for my youngest sister so she didn’t have to read the current format, which is 90% Clean and Clear ads, 10% Baby V and Zac Efron, I miss Jane and I wish Blueprint wasn’t going anywhere — it had good roots, it had a clear target audience and people willing to grow with it as long as it grew with us.
From Shake and Bake, via Not Martha.
Requesting a copy of the Toddler Answer Key, please
“Is it later?”
What? Like right now? Is it later right now? *gears whir, brain explodes*
If the bar gets any lower I’ll have to step over it
I think back to six months ago, when I was nesting to beat the band, cleaning grout with a toothbrush and spit-shining the ceiling fan blades. And then I look around my house as it is now, where you have to wade through crumbs ankle-deep just to reach the refrigerator.
Deep, heavy sigh.
Really, I’d just like to be able to find my children beneath the amber waves of clutter. Well, and to shelter them from the dirty laundry, which recently has become sentient and seems to be headed toward Reagan International.
stamp quilt ornaments
About the size of a big fancy postage stamp, for an ornament exchange I am a part of. I finished about 75% of these in October, before life started kicking my ass again and again and again.
Most of them are raw-edge patchwork, polyfil batting, with selvages for hanging loops. You can totally tell where my sewing machine started to kick the bucket, too.
I wanted to do candy-cane cozies but somehow this is what came out of my machine. Does that ever happen to you?
Our not-made-in-China Christmas
You know what? It’s hard! Very hard. First of all, all the toy recalls and lead-paint scares. Scary.
And then I started looking. Everything is made in China. I went to J. Crew the other day, when I was at the mall. All that stuff? Made in China. Martha Stewart’s new line at Macy’s? China. I came home and looked at our clothing tags and the bottom of our dishes and tags on our linens and marks on our toys: China. Wow.
This is all well and good for China.
But my inner proletariat says, Buy American! And my inner handcraft hippie says, Buy Handmade! And my inner Ma Ingalls says, Make It Yourself!
So I said to myself this holiday season, I am boycotting Made In China. Money where my mouth, et cetera.
And then I promptly came down with some sort of mysterious intestinal ailment. No energy to stay up late or run around town. It’s enough if I can manage to be vertical during the day.
All I have purchased so far is a Playmobil pirate set (made in Germany!) for Owen. I have, let’s see, one evening this week where I am not working or prepping for a diagnostic procedure or traveling to the cornfields of the Midwest. Do you think I can find a local toy store stocking a toy appropriate for a six-month-old that does not contain higher-than-acceptable levels of lead, arsenic or cadmium, preferably having been made someplace reassuring, like the Czech Republic? Failing that, do you think I could sew together something in under an hour and a half that could passably have come from “Santa’s workshop”?
I really, really hope you say yes.
recent flickr
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my sewing tutorials
See my tutorials featured on SMS' Handmade Holidays!
