General Update September 12, 2007

I’ve been using digital scrapping software to create pages, including an entire custom storybook for Jack.

Business and Mom…
I’m lucky if I get 18 hours of work done in a week. I have no idea how I’m supposed to work with a child. I can’t plunk him down in front of TV – not that I’d want to do that anyway, but it’s just not an option. Multi-tasking is all well and good, but when you have a kid pushing at you saying “pick up Mommy pick up” (he means “stand up”) or putting his stuffed animals in the water table, multi-tasking isn’t what you need.
I said to Max a few days ago: My job is to be Jack’s mom. That’s why I’m here. When Jack is awake, I need to be with him. That has to be my first priority. That means that business comes second and anything else comes third, fourth, etc. I have a baby-sitter but she has been rather flakey the last 2 weeks. Even at $5/hour, we can only afford her for a couple of hours a day, a couple of days a week.

Mom…
Jack, is, of course, the smartest boy in the world. Until I met sm00bs, I thought he must be the smartest child, but her daughter has more signs and words than Jack, so I’ll just have to qualify the statement with boy. He speaks sentences. Newer words include helicopter, I love you, I like X (where X is puppy, doggie, star, etc.), star, everybody, great-grandma, starlight/starbright. New signs are doll, water, and mouse. He’s getting more into signing now, but we can’t always tell what he’s signing, esp. since so many of the signs are similar. He signs “Signing Time.” Our TiVo just deleted our Signing Time stash, which Max unhappily said was a sign to buy the entire 13 DVD, 4 CD set. With shipping and tax it’s $202. A steal yes, but hardly cheap.

Jack also sings. Here are excerpts:

“e-f-p-nnnnnn-p”
“e-i-e-i-o”
“row row row boat… stream… maymaymaymay…”
“donny… sprites… donny… sprites”

He is very much into letters and numbers. Before his grandma came to visit, he could count 1-2-3. Now, he counts 3-4-5. Sometimes he remembers 1 and 2. I put some alphabet window clings on the office window and he loves to look at them, un-stick and re-stick them, and to look out the window.

Jack can also recognize many books by their covers, and also asks for books by name. His favorites are “Peef” (Peef The Christmas Bear), “Elmo”, “Chick-Chick-Boom-Boom”, “Chick-Chick 3″, “Hop Hop” (Pat the Bunny), and “Mimi”. A friend bought him a book that is also an Elmo puppet. The book is really the song “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, which is now known as the “Elmo song”. Everytime he sees Elmo in a store, or really anywhere, he exclaims Elmo Elmo! Do they put subliminal messages in these things? Narcotics? I don’t think it’s lead-based.

Speaking of lead-based, OY! I’m now going out of the way to not buy toys from China (so hard to do!). Also, we’ve gotten – OK Max installed – a reverse-osmosis water filter to take out the fluoride. And I’m hoping to get Jack off the bottle sooner rather than later because his bottles are made with plastic that leaches not-so-good chemicals into the fluid. We’re using gDiapers, a cloth/disposable hybrid that is much better for the environment than disposables (and 12 cents per diaper more expensive, but they’re so cute!). I need to post about all the green, granola stuff I’ve been moved to do since becoming a gDiaper parent. I’m driving Max nuts, I know, but so far I haven’t insisted on eating only food grown within 20 miles or only buying organic everything.

Today, Jack played with sidewalk chalk (or “Cray” as he calls it, for crayons) and loved it! He has a water table with rocks and water, but it used to have seeds, so he calls it “sees and wawer”. He started trying to brush his teeth seriously in the past few days. That’s a battle! I could post about that too. I wonder if it would be as boring as this probably is. If you read to the end, you should put a comment as to why. This is very long.

Why My Son Is Bald July 16, 2007

On July 11, my son’s hair looked like this:

Unruly, yes, but CURLY! Such beautiful, lovely curls!

Then Daddy took him for a hair cut on July 12….

My son is BALD!
Daddy let the barber SHAVE JACK’S HEAD!

Mommy came downstairs, saw Jack, and was speechless. “What did you to his head?” she asked in horror.
Mommy cried 3 times, each time she saw the back and sides of Jack’s curl-less head.
The very top has a little hair left:

Mommy is upset for MANY, MANY reasons:
I now have to put sunscreen in what’s left of my child’s hair.
Now that it’s growing out, people are saying, “Hey! Cute little mohawk!”
My child had BEAUTIFUL hair and now it’s all gone!
My son is BALD.
The transition from the top to the back/sides is awful. The only reason I don’t have the neighbors shave the top is then he will be completely bald.

But the number one reason I am so sad and pissed off:
We were supposed to get family pictures this week. We have NO family pictures. There are in existence, 6 pictures of the 3 of us together (hospital, Fresh Choice (2 months), NY (8 months), Moms Christmas Party (10 months), Annemarie’s wedding (6 months), professional but really bad photos (6 months)). In all of these pictures, except the one from NY, one of us looks funny. In the one from NY, Max thinks he looks funny, even though he doesn’t.
Our 6 month pics came out awful and I can’t even believe that I was so desperate for pictures that I actually bought any. Max didn’t want to have a family Christmas photo (which crushed me, but whatever), and we all got sick so soon after Jack’s birthday that we didn’t get 1 year shots. Ever since then, I have been looking forward to getting pictures when Jack turned 18 months. Professional pics are expensive, and there was so much going on, that it seemed we needed the excuse of a milestone.
Now, I have to wait until Jack’s hair grows back. My child has beautiful curly hair – he will not be bald in professional family pictures.
I may never let
Max
wear this down. He will never take Jack to get his haircut again. In addition to being upset over the hair, I am again reminded that he doesn’t understand why I love pictures so much, why I put so much effort into taking them and scrapbooking them, why I need to have a family picture. He can be a very good husband and father, but there is just some basic stuff that he doesn’t get. As the dragon would say: BLAH!

Mental Health Day April 26, 2007

Today, I could have used a mental health day. Despite the drugs, I didn’t sleep well from Tues to Wed, or from Wed to Thurs. Jack was having a really bad morning too. Max brought him up as soon as he heard me wake up. So my day started with trying to keep the cat and the child separated as I went to the bathroom.
I really just didn’t feel like being a mommy today. But you can’t not be a mommy, so you go on. Jack was upset because he couldn’t go “kick kick” first thing, and I was upset because all I really wanted to do was eat my cereal while reading Newsweek. It’s not everyday that’s like this; it’s just sometimes I just want to do things my way, simply because I want to.
Max & I both napped while Jack napped, and I actually slept this time. Jack woke up yelling “Momma” a little earlier than I would have liked, but he did sleep for almost 2 hours, so there wasn’t much I could do. He woke up at such a time that I could make the MOMS Club walk at the reservoir, if we hurried. There was way too much stress involved in getting there, but once we were there (10 minutes late), the walk itself was acceptable. It was very long though, which stressed my knee.
We finally did go “kick kick” about an hour after we got home. Again, I just really wanted to be able to sit in the hot tub and do my physical therapy exercises, but Jack really likes to try and put his hands in the filter, so I couldn’t. He also kicked my in the knee by accident. So my knee is really bugging me.
Because my father was here I didn’t have the chance to make a real dinner (long story), so Jack just ate jarred foods at the table with me, instead of the 3 of us sitting down. Max was kind enough to bathe Jack and put him down so that I could keep my knee up.
It’s 7:51pm and I still haven’t eaten dinner. So I’m going to do that now. I hope.