-
stuff and stuff*
Is it normal for a nine month old to eat more than an adult? Baby Bug has a huge appetite! She just shovels the food in. She keeps me hopping trying to think of new things to let her eat. My favorite foods are things that she can pick up with her fingers because this slows her down a bit. Pasta is great. So is buttered waffle and toast and really slippery pieces of banana. But the problem with letting her feed herself is that she just inhales the stuff. She has no teeth so I can’t really tell her to chew her bites but is it normal to gum it twice and then swallow? She worries me, this baby. I’m afraid I’m raising one of those hamburger swilling pigs from a Carl’s Jr. commercial. Her appetite is voracious!
She can eat a whole cup full of macaroni and cheese, some bits of leftover chicken, a fourth of cheese sandwich, two cubes of squash mixed with rice cereal, about a zillion sips of apple juice mixed with water and the crust off a slice of pizza! (Broken into baby pinky sized pieces of course).
Yet she has no appetite for anything pureed. Still. I can only get her to eat her homemade baby food squash by mixing it with plain yogurt. She loves yogurt. Good thing too because back during the great illness of 06 I wasn’t producing much milk and I was really worried that Baby Bug might not be getting her vitamins. But things are working again now.
But I didn’t really want to blog about food. That’s just the picture I had handy. I wanted to blog about how I didn’t listen to you all about taking it easy. I worked like a mad woman yesterday and cleaned my house from top to bottom. It felt so good. After letting things go haywire for three weeks straight it felt good to have a clean carpet again. The laundry is done (thanks to my mom), the groceries are bought and put away (also thanks to my mom), the beds are made, the bathroom is clean, the cat litter and cat food is vacuumed up off the carpet… all is well again. Sigh……
And I’m fine! I am! Really! I thought I might have pulled a stitch trying to put away a 20 pound bag of rice in the cupboard where the water heater is (I know! But I have no other place to stow it!!!) but I’m fine. Just a little twinge and it was gone. I lift Baby Bug all day long and sometimes I even hoist her onto my hip that is dangerously close to incision number four. But it’s fine! It barely hurts! Maybe I didn’t even have surgery. Maybe it was all a scam. Maybe they just cut some surface cuts on my skin and charged my insurance a whole whopping lot of money. Cause I don’t feel anything.
I’m thanking God and moving on. It’s good to be healthy again. For a time there I thought I might have to live the rest of my life with pain. It was something I had to consider. I have a friend who has had serious back surgery and pain is a daily thing for her. I am in awe of that. I couldn’t do it. I hate the thought of being dependent on medication just to get through. But this is how it really is for a lot of people. So if anything this whole ordeal has taught me to be thankful.
I’m thankful but not necessarily smart. I didn’t rest a bit. We even went to the park yesterday. I had to put Baby Bug in the sling for a few minutes too (on top of my stitches!!!) just so I could get the stroller out of the trunk without having to put her down on the cement to play with oil stains and broken glass. It was a tiny bit uncomfortable but not that bad.
I miss the sling. The stroller is great but I don’t get to see her moving her arms up and down when she gets excited. She’s way out there in front of me behind the massive collapsing shade thing. If I want to look at her I have to stop walking and walk around to the front of her. I loved the sling because she was close to me. Like my own personal little friend, listening to every word I said as we ambled down the street. My mom thinks I’m nuts that I like to harness a sack of potatoes to my chest and take a walk. But I do. It’s just easier. Maneuvering a stroller up and down curbs, in between people is kind of a pain. It just doesn’t fit everywhere. Also it’s a pain in the neck to push up a hill. I’m much better at hiking up hills with something strapped to me than I am pushing something that wants to roll back onto me.
So maybe I’ll have to look into some kind of back pack. Or maybe I just need to find less hilly places to walk.
Sigh… I know this is a boring post. I wish I could hire a babysitter so I could have more time to be witty. But I guess that’s not really a high priority on the list of things to budget for.
*I think I used that title before… but again, no time for wittiness…
-
back from the dead… maybe
I’m back. I don’t even know where to start without sounding like an old person in a retirement home. I don’t want to ramble on about my many ailments but that’s what’s been going on. I got sick. Really really sick and now I seem to have the mystery illness that thankfully I finally saw a proper doctor about today. As opposed to an ER doctor (Ugh. The ER. That was like the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. Should I even bother blogging about that?) Hopefully by next Wednesday we’ll have a real diagnosis or I’ll magically be better. Magically better would be great.
Right now I’m feeling pretty good. But I said that yesterday and ended up spitting out all my words into the toilet. I hate puking. Hate it hate it hate it. I’ve been doing a lot of it. I would say that I could declare this year “the year of the puke”. As I never used to puke. But then I got pregnant and had morning sickness. That was a joy. Then I went on a boat and got sea sick. Joy joy. Then I got this mystery illness and it’s been a triple threat of joydom.
I have some theories about what might be wrong with me. I caught the cold. The giant sinus-snauctopus. Then I was doing a lot of freelance work at night and drinking coffee after nine-o-clock at night, which I never do. I think between trying to be the super mom with the new master chore list in the day time and the freelance designer at night I forgot to drink enough water. Like maybe I forgot to drink water for a whole day or maybe two. I’m a nursing mother, a really really stupid one. I was sick with a cold and then I got dehydrated and then Then THEN I decided to have “new recipe night” and I fixed something strange and foreign and I think I gave myself food poisoning.
I think it was all just too much for my body and my body went on strike. Or I could have stomach cancer. Not really. I shouldn’t kid. Stomach cancer is a very real illness that I’m sure lots of good people suffer from. I don’t think I have stomach cancer. I just think it in my crazy imagination sometimes. Anybody who knows me, knows how my crazy imagination works.
So anyway… I’m back from the sticks. (That’s where I’ve been since Sunday… sans laptop and phone). My mom brought me home today and I saw a proper doctor. My new is doctor really nice and smart as a whip. I think she’ll get to the bottom of it. She ruled out a lot of things we thought it might be, like kidney failure or appendicitis or some kind of bowl blockage… She thinks it’s most likely a virus gone terribly wrong. Possibly something wrong with my gallbladder, possibly kidney stones, possibly a pulled stomach muscle or possibly an infection but most likely it’s just a really really bad virus. I have an abdomen ultrasound next Wednesday. She’s being very thorough.
How’s Baby Bug you’re wondering? Fine. She’s such a little scrap. She didn’t get sick a bit. (Thank you Lord! I think I would have lost my mind if we were both sick and my mind was very close to being lost already.) In fact I think she doubled her healthiness and added a whole extra dose of wiggliness to her repertoire of tricks. She is just non-stop activity these days. In the first days I was sick I just lay on the floor and let her crawl all over me. It was all I could do. I couldn’t even think straight. That’s why my mom had to come rescue me. Toby keeps talking about us moving up north and I really really want to move but the thought of being away from my safety net of family makes me very afraid. I would be lost without my family.
For the first time ever Baby Bug had to be taken care of by somebody else besides me. Grandma rocked her to sleep every night. When she woke up crying in the night, her Auntie CC got up and put her in bed with her. Auntie CC also fed her baby food and dressed her and changed her and pretty much played “Mom” when she wasn’t working. Baby Bug went out to dinner with my family and learned to love to eat Mexican food (while I stayed home groaning on the couch or puking). Her cousins played with her in the daytime. Uncle Chaos used his vulcan mind meld on her and put her to sleep for her nap times. My brother is amazing with babies. All he does is pick them up in his great big burly arms and they magically fall asleep. Every time. He was a lifesaver. They all were. I didn’t mention my Dad because he has a new job and is gone all day long but I can’t leave him out. There’s something about my Dad that just makes me feel better. Maybe because he just worries about me so much. He called to check on me daily from his job. At night after everyone was asleep he came to check on me and told me how worried he was. I love my Dad. I love them all.
But you already know that.
