Other things I read last time that turned out to be true

The moose is one cool little baby.  She's smiling and cooing and when she sees herself in the mirror, she thinks she is the cat's meow.  Tummy time is difficult because she keeps rolling over onto her back.  She's the size of a small monster truck, and most people note how large and alert she is.   And she was routinely fussy around sunset for a few hours, though not so terrible.  She would tend to fuss, fall asleep for 10-15 minutes, wake up, fuss a little more, etc., until she went to sleep for the long haul.  But this week (she is seven weeks today), it is like a switch has been flipped - she is hardly fussy at all, unless she is hungry, for a few moments before gas or other GI function, or if she is overtired, which she hardly is, as she still spends the vast majority of her time napping. 

Also, she is starting to get so we don't have to change her diaper overnight, and she goes back to sleep very quickly after a feeding at night if we don't change her.  If we do, well, she can be up for her normal 90 minute awake time at 4:30am, and that's not so cool.  

In other words, she is the baby described as a normal baby in all those books and descriptions.  Chilling after 6 weeks (Bisousette was at her worst around 8-9 weeks).  90 minute periods of wakefulness before she falls asleep again  Eating approximately every 2-3 hours during the day and at longer intervals during the night.    (The Bisousette kinda ate all the time.)

As for me, I might be chilling out too.  I hadn't weighed myself since my OB appointment last Thursday - this morning I'm down 40 pounds total from the peak pregnancy weight.   I'm doing weights every other day (full body workouts with swiss ball and hand weights, nothing fancy) and when the weather is good, I try to take two walks.  The weather has been super craptastic this past week, so I haven't done much by way of walking.  I could do DDR, but I'm still having some physical issues that stand in the way, and should improve in another month or two.  Then I hope to get in 3 runs a week and 2-3 sessions of DDR in addition to weights, which will be done with the bowflex in the basement in addition to heavier hand weights.  I've not been in decent shape since the first pregnancy, and it is my goal, once the baby is a little older, to make some real time for myself to be fit, and to get back down to my good weight (130 or so, which is a long way away at this point).

Here's to cool babies.

 

Sleep training mama
The moose is a champion sleeper for someone not quite 7 weeks old.  She sleeps probably 6 hours during the day (usually a 3 hour nap, a 2 hour nap which overlaps with the toddler's nap! and a few other catnaps), and then will generally sleep from 10pm-4:30 am, eat, then pass out again until 8am.  Truth is, she sleeps so well that the 6 hour stretches are difficult for me, because when we wake up at 4:30. I have a tough time getting back to sleep.  You know, after all that sleep. However, I do need more than 6 hours myself.  Maybe I should go to bed at 8pm or something... 

This week at the farmer's market

I took the Bisousette, who was a big hit with the farmers once she admitted that she liked to play in the dirt.  We went here:

White Barn Farm

I picked up sugar snap peas, radishes, a head of butter lettuce, and scallions.  One of my goals is to try a new veggie each week, one I've not really tried before.  This week was radishes.  I know, I've had radishes.  Plasticky radishes that come with salad mix or in a salad buffet.  I've never actually bought any and ate them fresh.  So I got a little bunch, washed one, chopped a slice, and, woah.  Kinda bitter. Peppery.  Exactly what you would think of when you think of a stereotypical stern mom saying "eat your vegetables!"  Not my cup of tea- apparently the French dip them in salt and bite in to them, like an apple.  A bitter, peppery, salty apple.  Or have them sliced with butter and salt on bread.  Must be lots of butter.  

Anyway, I sliced one into small slivers and added it to my salad.  The salad was last week's head of romaine (which I washed, cut, then refrigerated in a bowl with a piece of paper towel and covered with saran wrap.), some corn cooked on the cob (shuck your ear, wash it, salt it, wrap it in a paper towel, mircowave for 3-4 minutes, cut kernals off the ear if desired, or rub in butter and eat - it is perfectly yummy), feta cheese, and my own salad dressing mix made of two parts olive oil, one part balsamic vinegar, some sliced garlic scapes (leftover from last week's run to the farmer's market), salt and pepper.  Jamie Oliver says 3 to 1 oil to vinegar in your own salad dressing, but I find that to be too oily.  

With the dressing and the cheese and whatnot, I hardly tasted the radishes, and it was good.  

Anyone have an awesome homemade salad dressing recipe to share?  I've started making my own, and I don't want to go back, especially since you have to be super careful with the store bought salad dressings or you end up with vegetable oil and high fructose corn syrup concoction.  Plus, it's probably cheaper to make your own, all told.

I'm wondering what to do with the scallions.  Slice into omelets?  Make a oniony cornbread? Anyone love scallions and have a wonderful idea for them?  I still have some garlic scapes to cut up, and I think that would make a mighty fine cornbread with the scallions...

 

Whole Milk conundrum

Soon, very soon, the Bisousette will turn two.  At which point she is supposed to switch to 2% milk.  These recommendations are made because kids are fat these days.  However, the Bisousette is not fat, and I don't really believe that fat causes people to be fat - fat + fructose causes people to be fat.  Apparently a lot of people out there let their toddlers drink soda (really?  like, pepsi and that crap for toddlers?) and eat a lot of junk, cookies and chips and the like.  (Bisousette has cookies and chocolate and chips, actually, almost every day, just a very small amount, I hope.  Not entirely sure what she gets fed at the nanny's house when she is over there).  Milk is an issue because there are some kids who drink milk to the exclusion of eating other foods, but Bisousette doesn't do that.  She eats everything all day long (except olives.  I don't see martinis in her near future).  I buy fancy organic milk for her beefed up with omega 3 fatty acids.  So healthy fat, a robust amount, for her big ol' brain, which is 60% fat.  And when I cook for Bisousette, she eats what I eat, which is cereal or oatmeal or eggs in the morning, with fruit and after that veggies or fruit with protein, or maybe whole wheat pasta.  And a bit of chocolate chip banana bread today.      

Did you guys switch to 2% at two?  

Hola!

The moose is old enough that she's been, well, awake from time to time.  Thus a little less time to blog.  Last night she was up from 4am to 7am - just in time for the toddler to wake up.  That's the difference between the first baby and the second.  You sleep train and put a schedule together as soon as humanly possible, because there is no catching up during the day as there used to be.  Not that we're leaving the little one to cry it out at 6 weeks.  But I'm considering putting her in her own room very soon, much sooner than I did the Bisousette. 

(I'm trying to put out of mind the blog that I was reading the other day from a woman whose 3 month old son died a few months ago for no apparent reason.  Horrible!  I could hardly leave the moose out of sight for more than a minute for a couple days after reading her entries.  Sounded like SIDS - awful awful awful, and I feel for her so much.  But note to self - do not read dead baby blogs.  Or Cormac McCarthy. Until your kid is at least 25.  But before grandkids).  

I'm cleared to resume all activites, per the OB.  It's raining though, so I have a good excuse not to run this morning.  I did lift some weights and did some actual crunches on the Swiss ball.  Not that my lower abs will be visible for some time.  Gah.  I've lost 39 pounds, which is just a little less than I had lost at this stage with the Bisousette.  I'm in no mood to be fat, though.  And the breastfeeding hunger is not as intense as pregnancy hunger, nor as intense as I remember it being last time.  I can skip whole meals, being busy,  and not even think about it, and there is no consideration of eating whole cakes, which one can contemplate doing while pregnant, yet can't possibly do, due to compression of one's stomach.  

I have a whole different idea about what to eat and what is good than I did when I first started watching what I ate.  If Mr. Bisous didn't bring home chips and cookies, I would be totally golden (except for the chocolate chip banana bread I make sometimes - only when the bananas aren't eaten in time.).  I'll blame him.  :)  But I'm getting back to the point where I find chips and nasty things somewhat revolting.  That's how I spent my early thirties - the thought of french fries was rather disgusting.  All that oil and weird chemical flavor additives, for what?  A few seconds of crispy goo in the mouth?  

If only I could feel that way about diet coke. 

6 weeks old

The littlest one, my little moose, will be 6 weeks old tomorrow.  6 weeks is supposed to be the height of fussiness. And, indeed, she is slightly fussy in the evening - she'll want to be rocked and fed and walked around sometimes, and seems to have a hard time settling to sleep.  During the day, however, she is very easy.  I've generally been putting her down on the couch (and hanging out nearby to keep a close eye) or in her swing, but today I thought, heck, why not the pack n play?  So I put her down.  While she was awake.  On her back. 

And she cooed to the cat for a while, and then she fell asleep!  On her back, arms and legs splayed out without a care in the world.  I mentioned to the nanny how I had no idea that you could actually put babies down like that, for real, and she said, "Yeah, when Bisousette was little I hadn't realized that babies could cry that much."  This from a mother of four.

So, my parenting tip - have the difficult baby first.  Then you don't know any better.

*I'm also realizing that my first babysitter might not have been crazy, but that she didn't show up three weeks ago because my baby was, well, awful to be around.

 

Finally!

Lost another pound, after 10 days of nada. 

I jut figured how much I have to lose to get to my wedding weight, and I think I'll go into a corner and sulk now.

Local grown

I suppose we are officially out of baby jail now (though it doesn't really end until Tuesday).  That's the first 6 weeks when you are not supposed to take the baby out too much, as her immune system is nada.  Breastfeeding helps, especially against GI illness, but it is no substitute for your own antibodies and killer T cells and other cool checks against viral and bacterial invaders. 

But we took both children to Kohl's yesterday, and to the farmer's market today, so I suppose we are officially out and about.  

The farmer's market made me happy - we got to talk to the farmers, who set up the stand right across from their 3 acre farm in the neighboring town.  Talk about locally grown.  And it is inexpensive - compared to the subcription services where you fork out $600 for the season or $20 a week for a box (which you have to pick up anyway) - at the market yourself you pick what you want, and because we got there at the end of the hours, we got a free big bag of spinach picked this morning. 

All told we got fresh spinach, basil (our basil plant at home is dead or nearly so, and I've been too preoccupied to start some more seeds), garlic shoots (think scallions, but garlic-y), and kohlrabe (a veggie I've not heard of before) for $16.  Just the tomato plant would have been that much at Home Depot.  The spinach is amazingly tender, like the baby spinach you get at the store, in full grown, happy leafy dark spinach.  

I'm happy to try the kohlrabe tonight - maybe in a stir fry of some kind with the garlic shoots.  I've been meaning to try new veggies, but at the farmer's market you can talk about how to prepare it and what it is - that's not something you can get at the grocery store.  

It must be some sort of innate biological darwinian pleasure that can be gained from fresh-grown stuff, especially gardening, because I'm a little at a loss to explain how happy and pampered I feel eating these awesome veggies.  We have plenty of land, but so many critters around our house that gardening would require armed guards or an electric fence.  I'm still temped to try it, but we're starting out with containers on the back porch.  Well, one container, the tomato plant.  

Wow

The 5&1/2 week old baby actually slept through the night last night.  And no silly 5 hour definition of slept through the night.  She actually slept from 10pm to 5:30 am.  Then she woke up, slurped down some milk, and slept again until 8:30.  I'm actually well-rested!  The house is relatively clean!  I have crocheted a mama and baby penguin, and I've caught up with most of the TiVo'd programs.  If most babies are really like this, I no longer feel sorry for new parents.

(I'm still cheating a bit - she still sleeps next to me - I tried again to stick her in the bassinet with the miracle blanket and it devolved into a 2 hour scream fest two nights ago.  She is also sleeping on her side, not on her back.  She waves her arms a lot, and manages to move from her back to her side much of the time anyway.  The only fix for that is a swaddle, but if she's already sleeping pretty well...)

 

Oh dear

I haven't lost any weight in the last week.  This is not good, as my current weight is patently unacceptable.  As in, I go back to work in a few weeks and I have very few clothes that fit.  The pants aren't that much of a deal - the maternity work pants obviously still fit.  But shirts are a big problem.  I need shirts that button up or zip up (I have an array of zip-up sweaters, but that works for the fall, when I went back to work last time - this is summer, folks).  I need work-acceptable zip-up shirts.  That don't make me look like a member of the Sopranos.  And the milk bar, sadly, does not fit under XL button-up shirts.  Not yet.  Normally I am a large medium, a 34C, none of this triple gargantuan food repository craziness.  This can happen to you, folks!  Use birth control.

 And the milk bar is uncomfortable, because I have been pumping each morning but didn't get around to it this morning, so the milk bar is like, dude, I've got an extra 6-8 oz here and I've been waiting and waiting and no one will help me!  The newborn is not helpful - she had a growth spurt yesterday and ate constantly, which only worsens my issue today.  Today she has been waking up for brief spurts to nurse for a minute or two, then she falls asleep for another three hours.  Because she is growing growing growing, and soon will be the size of a moose.  

The is no way I will be doing bouncy exercises any time soon.  Bouncy exercises are my favorite kind, but you try bouncing around with two water baloons strapped to your chest.  It's NO FUN. 

Boy, I'm glad I got those complaints off my chest.