Domestic happenings

Belle has had an exciting week.

On Wednesday morning I stuck my finger in her mouth and lo and behold, her first tooth is finally through!  It was only FOUR MONTHS ago that I was positive it was breaking through the gums at any second.  ANY SECOND.  I have, logically, attributed every hint of grumpiness since October to this tooth.  She probably could have rolled herself onto one of the thousands of pine needles that have nestled themselves down into our carpet from our Christmas tree (and will haunt us until at least next summer) and had the offending needle actually protruding from her forehead while she cried and I would have run first for the Orajel.  But, the tooth has appeared.  One down, nineteen to go. 

The other excitement is that she started crawling.  I mean technically she is crawling.  Here's the definition of crawl from thefreedictionary.com:

crawl 

1. To move slowly on the hands and knees or by dragging the body along the ground; creep.

 

Yup, that's what she does.  I have to admit though, that the second definition is much closer to reality:

 

2. To advance slowly, feebly, laboriously, or with frequent stops






Regardless of the lack of grace or speed at which she is travelling, I think she is quite proud of herself.  And from all the hollering and cheering by the rest of us any time she does it, we are proud too. 

So bring on all the banged up heads from crawling into things.  I'm sure there will be a good number of injuries in the near future.  And I'm just as sure that I'll keep assuming that the crying is from teeth.  Luckily I have a new bottle of Orajel ready. 

Big D: Heroic and obedient

While in the bathroom cleaning up a mess of washcloths that he knocked onto the floor:

"There's the biggest man I've never seen in the bathroom!  It's Goliath!  I will fight you Goliath!  As soon as I pick up these washcloths!"

Hello again

Ok, so I admit it's been ages since I posted.  I did not get thrown out with the Christmas tree or make a resolution to stay off the computer.  Just been dealing with normal domestic life.  Here's updates on everyone in the house:

Belle: Has decided that her first priority is moving.  Just yesterday she finally figured out how to inch-worm herself forward a bit.  Very exciting.  I mean that.  I know to you all it's not that great, but to us there was lots of cheering and clapping.  And this morning she moved herself well over a foot with her inch-worminess and didn't smash her face into the floor during the process even once!  What a big girl!  She also likes to eat finger food.  She may be developing an addiction to pancakes.  I'm fairly sure that any finger food she eats ends up being a negative calorie meal for her though.  It takes so much brain power and determination to pick up that tiny piece of pancake with her two little fingers, look at it intently, slowly bring it to her mouth and then gum it for about 30 seconds that she easily uses up the 14 calories that the tiny bite contained. 



Big D: Is in a tell-me-a-story phase.  It is unrelenting.  "Mommy, can you tell me a story about Dalton and Chick and the spaceship and the moon car and the bulldozer?"  Yes, that is an actual story.  There is a whole series of Chick stories, Chick being the little stuffed chick that Dalton sleeps with.  Why I named his boy stuffed animal Chick, I don't know, but it stuck.  Chick and his little boy have all sorts of adventures.  The problem with stories is that while normally I don't really feel like spinning a huge adventurous tale, every once in a while I do.  And that is a bad thing. 

If my stories always consisted of, "One day a race car raced really fast on a track and won!  The End!"  Big D would think, "huh, stories kind of suck.  I'll go play something else."  But no, I have to get in moods where I tell some exuberant, long-winded (I know you find that hard to believe...) tale with sound effects and jokes and motions and occasionally songs.  What is wrong with me?  OF COURSE HE'S GOING TO ASK FOR THAT EXACT SAME STORY AGAIN!  And again and again and again.... And will he let me leave out a sound effect, motion or song.  Noooooo.   And do I want to go to that much effort again?  Of course not.  My story telling mood is long gone. 

I really need to decide whether I'm a fun, exciting mom or just a boring, practical one.  No more waffling back and forth.  It just causes me more work.

Me: which leads me to my other issues.  I know this is the time of year that people make resolutions.  I also know myself well enough to know that resolutions are a complete waste of time.  I will not follow them.  What resolutions should I make?  Well, that's a list...

1.  Be a better housekeeper.  I had a conversation with my good friend Saskia over the weekend (thank you to her mother and my husband for watching the kids so we could have a lovely chat!) about how our houses are never clean.  She commented that she would need to change the core of her personality in order for it to be clean, and I feel exactly the same way.  Maybe I just need to decide if I am a good housekeeper or a lousy one.  A good one would be motivated to keep the house clean.  She'd decide, for instance, that she should vacuum up Cheerios instead of blogging.  A poor housekeeper wouldn't care.  She'd blissfully step on the Cheerios and think how that crunching noise reminded her of the crinkle of wrapping paper and she should go blog about how fun Christmas was.  Instead I am a mediocre housekeeper who sees all the mess but isn't motivated to clean it.  Just mildly annoyed by it.  Screw the New Year's Resolution, I need one of those robot housekeepers that the Jetson's had.  That'd be perfect. 

2.  Pick a hobby.  I have fairly limited time during the day to do any grown up sort of hobby.  I can't run the sewing machine while nursing or let Dalton help me cut wire for jewelery.  I've been having an etsy-identity crisis in what sort of crafty thing to make in  my free time.  I have this unfocused need to make something.  But what is that thing?  Sewing is fun, but can't come up with anything I really want to make.  I have these cute glass pieces to make necklaces out of but can't find a good glaze to use on them to keep their little decorations.  I like a bunch of wire wrapped jewelry that I've seen but there is very limited time to practice my skills at wire bending.  Here's a pictures of my very first wire necklace.  It may be cute but is so flimsy that a strong gust of wind would contort it. 




Medman: Is a movie star! Well, actually a TV star.  Ok, a local commercial star.  His clinic is putting out 3 commercials, one of which is already out, on the local TV station's website about medical stuff.  He has face time in all three!  Exciting, no?  This weeks commercial was on pediatrics and he is on at the end looking like the fun doctor who is playing with a little girl.   All the other doctors are testing reflexes and such.  Not Medman, he's helping a little girl rummage through a box of toys.  This is the reason that children love him.  Here's a screen shot. 

You'd better believe that if he has a speaking part in any of the other ones, I'll post a link to it.  He'll kill me but I'll post it!  :)  

perhaps he needs closer supervision...

"Mommy!  I filled my underwear up with pee!"

"You got a little pee in them?"

"No, I FILLED them up with pee.  Then I rinsed them out and rolled them and put them on the counter." 

Sleep, stool and snot

How's that for a title?  Part of this post is actually a couple weeks old.  It's the snot part and I figured people didn't want to read about snot over the holidays.  Do they want to read about it in January, you ask?  Well, you are still reading this.

Sleep:
I reported recently that Belvedere had started sleeping well again.  I retract that statement.  In the past several weeks it has gotten worse again with lots of overnight wake ups. Quite unhappy wakings.  Why, you ask?  Well, that leads us to our second topic...


Stool:
Not like, "Pull up a bar stool." 

Like "Hello, I'm Dr. WhatsHisName.  Do you have a fever?  A cough?  Stomach pains?  How is your stool?"  That sort of stool. 

Little Belle has started to eat a greater quantity of solid foods.  (Why are they called solid foods when they are watery mush?)  And of course, when what goes in is more solid, what comes out is more solid.  Among the 5 of you that read this, if you haven't had a 7 month old baby in your life recently, that solid-coming-out idea takes a bit of adjustment.  It requires a fairly complicated combination of flexing certain muscles while relaxing certain other areas. 

And you know what makes the process worse?  When the woman who is supposed to care for you and help you through these sorts of things THINKS that she is helping you by giving you applesauce repeatedly.  After all, apple juice helps D when traffic is a little backed up.  Unfortunately, this woman who is usually somewhat obsessive about researching things like this probably muttered something like, "This isn't rocket science," and continued to fill spoon after spoon with applesauce.  Follow that up with feeding her Baby Mum Mums, which are described as "Select Superior Rice Rusks" but are in actuality some sort of weird white condensed air that tastes like styrofoam.  Belle likes them. 

Had that mother googled "seven month old constipation"  she would have found thousands of web pages that all started the same way.  "Stop giving the baby things that cause constipation like applesauce and rice products." 

Crap.  Well, perhaps that isn't quite the right response.  'Never-gonna-crap' maybe.  Sorry Belle.  Now she is on a strict diet of prunes, pears and peas.  And while things aren't quite back to normal, the traffic report from her intestines would sound something like, "The deadlock that's been here forever is finally beginning to break up and we're seeing some of the traffic start to move.  There's still enough congestion that if you don't have to go out, stay home.  But if it's an emergency and you join the traffic flow, you will get to your destination eventually.  We hope." 

Snot:
A week before Christmas I got a cold.  It goes without saying that I hate colds.  Colds are universally hated.  And the cold I got was a pathetically weak one.  Basically just filled up my sinuses and that's it.  No real sore throat or cough or anything.  Just snot.  Yuck. 

Medman rounded with an ear, nose and throat doctor a couple months ago who told him how often he recommends the use of a neti pot.   For anyone of you who doesn't know, a neti pot is a little pot of water that you basically pour up one nostril and the water comes running out the other, taking all sorts of bad things out with it.   My response? "Isn't that the thing that the guy on YouTube used to put coffee up his nose?"  Yes.  But that is not the recommended way to use one.

But the doctor told Medman that it is a highly effective (if sort of prehistoric) way of getting your sinuses cleared out, so Medman (who was congested at the time) tried it and reported that it was vaguely weird, but pretty easy and he did feel much better. 

Good for you, Medman.  I'm not sticking saline solution up my nose.   I've shot fluids out my nose before in unfortunate situations where people have made me laugh at the wrong time, and it is not something I would willingly do to myself.  But in Walgreens there is this video that runs nonstop of small children using neti pots with big smiles on their faces.  If a child can do it, can a rocket scientist?  I mean really, the idea of rinsing out your sinuses does make very logical, practical sense. 

So I tried it.  I stuck the saline solution in the lukewarm water and tilted my head and poured water into my nose.  And guess what?  It was vaguely weird but easy and it did make me feel much better.  Much, much better.  And my cold pretty much went from serious congestion to over in about 24 hours.  I'd have no reservations about doing it again. 

Those of you that dislike germs will be interested to know (if you are still reading this incredibly long post) that the flu virus multiplies in your sinuses for 3-4 days before you develop symptoms.  Therefore, rinsing your sinuses with a neti pot within a couple days of exposure to it will rinse out the virus and very much help your chances of not getting sick.  Vaguely weird neti pots are MUCH better than a bout of the flu.  That's my opinion.