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airing out my laundry
I should change the name of this blog to “Tales from the Laundromat”.
Really there’s nothing new on the laundromat front, thankfully. It’s just that we were there yesterday and I thought Baby Bug looked cute in the laundry basket. I could only keep her in the baby carrier for so long while I was folding all the clean clothes. I thought my back was going to break. This motherhood thing is back breaking.
I saw another mother there with a thirteen-month-old. We chatted for a little bit and she eyed the parasite-baby growing out of my chest enviously. She said she tried to fit her baby in the carrier one last time before they came to the laundromat and he just wouldn’t fit. By the looks of her long face, I take it that doing laundry while trying to keep a thirteen-month-old happy is a lot more difficult than carrying around a ten pound three-month-old attached to your chest. I have a grim future ahead of me.
I’m struggling lately. Not so much with the baby… (although, who stole my happy quiet baby and replaced her with the yelling baby? Can you please bring her back, stat?) but more so with the million mile long list of things I want to do and can’t. My freelance work is killing me. All the clients I got rid of before the baby, by referring them to somebody else, have all come back to me saying my referral artist just isn’t good enough. That’s great for my ego but the work load is just impossible. And maybe I should do better research before I go referring people.
The thing that really gets me is that all the work I’m getting is fun, easy work and easy money. If I wasn’t a full time mom, I’d whip it out in no time. But add a baby to the mix and I’m slower than a snail trudging through molasses. Baby Bug only takes so many naps a day and at least one of those naps has to be spent blogging, right?
I know a bunch of you are going to say, why don’t you ask Toby to help? Or what about your mother-in-law or hiring a babysitter? Well, here’s the rub. When I decided I wanted to be a mom, I decided I really wanted to be a mom in the biggest way. The good and the bad and the never-ending-ness of it. Toby and I made an agreement that I would be the major care-giver ALL of the time. No daycare, no babysitters (other than grandma) and no every other-night-you-watch-the-kid-so-I-can-take-a-shower. That’s just the way things work in our marriage. I knew what I was getting into long before I even got married and way way way long before we ever started trying to have kids. So what I’m basically saying is I made my bed and now I have to lie in it and I’m stupid to be complaining about it on my blog. (Like that’s going to stop me.)
The mother-in-law thing was working great but Baby Bug has turned into the shrieker lately and she’s getting heavy for her grandma’s frail arms. Her grandma loves her oh-so-very-much but she’s just a little too much for her. I spend a lot of my time rescuing Grandma from Baby Bug. It’s easy to deal with a baby crying when you are holding them but when somebody else is holding them in the next room over, it feels like your finger nails are getting peeled backwards. The babysitter thing just isn’t going to work unless I leave the house and the baby. But that doesn’t fit into my pre-baby agreement I made with Toby. Baby comes first, work comes second. And there will be no escaping to Starbucks just to earn a few extra bucks.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I knew Toby wouldn’t be able to help me. Toby has his own business that takes up 80% of his day. The other 20% is taken up with him trying to get over his 80% work day. We don’t have weekends here. Saturday and Sunday are work days too. Not to be all stuck in the 50’s but Toby needs a wife who will cook and clean and not hand him the baby when he’s trying to decompress from shooting the house that belongs to the owner of Broadcom. We have a crazy life. This is just the way it is. Everybody has a simple solution that they think will fix everything for us but the reality is that we have to make our way to those solutions in our own slow and exasperating way.
I knew I’d have to put my career on the back burner. The error I made is that I didn’t know how hard it would be for me to turn my back on it. I guess I keep secretly thinking I can do it all and be so successful that Toby will have to start taking my business seriously and he’ll be okay with me hiring a babysitter now and then. But I have to do it all secretly because of our agreement. I promised. I made a deal. This is my life. This is what I get in exchange for getting to take long walks on the beach every day.
The problem with my secret plan on becoming successful behind Toby’s back is that the money is just not coming in as fast as the work is. I can’t let him know that I’m bursting at the seams. On top of all my clients who just won’t go away, I do some work for Toby’s clients too. And I’m a mom and a full time housewife with a house that is falling down and a landlady who is crazy. I just don’t know how I can keep it up.
Then fun things come along like making mermaid tails and developing a website to sell them just in time for Halloween. How can I say no to a fun idea like that? I’ve already gotten a few requests without even advertising a peep about it. When I tell Toby about my fun mermaid tail idea he gets mad at me and calls it my “arts and crafts crap”. (Except he uses a different word and the only reason I don’t type that other word on this blog is because I’m thinking of you, Mom and you, Aunt Kathy up in Canada who don’t like to think of your little Brenda using potty language.) In a way he’s right. I am a mother and that is my most important job of all time. But stopping all the fun jobs that come along is like cutting out part of my heart. I love making things. It’s who I am. And yes, a happy mom is a good mom. So somehow I’m going to have to do it all or figure out what to do and what not to do.
Anybody need some freelance graphic design work? Send me an url to your online portfolio.
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Getting Things Done
I accomplished three major things yesterday. I shaved my legs, I changed the sheets on our bed and I gave Baby Bug a bath. Woooo Hoooo! This is exciting stuff on this blog. But this is big for me because it was the first time in ages that I actually accomplished the things I set out to do for the day. And I did them all while Baby Bug was awake, not napping. The napping has gone to hell in a hand basket.
Baby Bug and I have not figured out how to synchronize the napping with the time I need to get things done. She likes to fall asleep with me (which is nice! a nap in the middle of the day! how grand!) or in the sling while we are on a walk or in the car. I read somewhere that if your baby falls asleep every time you take a drive then maybe she is sleep deprived. So I freaked out and started charting when she was asleep and when she was awake. She’s fine. She sleeps ten hours at night (I know!) and five during the day. She’s regular as raisin bran.
Still, the napping does not occur when I can actually get anything done. When I need to get things done, I have to hold her. ALL OF THE TIME. Once I pick her up, there’s no putting her down again. She’s too smart for that. The floor is no longer interesting once she has seen the view from above. So when she does wake up, I try and let her lay around as along as possible. At least until the pterodactyl shrieks begin.
Remember the sweet Aaaaah-boooh movie? It’s a good thing I filmed it when I did. She’s not doing that anymore. Now she’s into yelling. Happy yells but still yelling. Aaaack! Aaaack! Aaaack! she says. When she’s laying on her changing pad looking up at the Chinese paper umbrellas she yells at them because they are not moving. I rigged up a thread so that I can give it a swift tug and send the parasols swirling every time she shrieks. So there I am attempting to read emails and tugging on a thread every other second. Then I tied the thread to her hand and she loved that. Except she pulled too hard and all the umbrellas got tangled up. That was fun.
I’m learning to do things with the baby. My arms are getting very strong. I hope to have muscle definition in a few months. Maybe I’ll look like Madonna. I’m very good at holding Baby Bug now. I juggle her from one arm to the other like an experienced waitress handles a whole table full of hot steaming plates. I make Toby very nervous. He’s always looking at me with bugged out eyes like I’m going to drop her or something. What? It’s not normal to balance the baby on your elbow? Why don’t you try cutting lettuce while you hold a wiggly three month old?
I couldn’t figure out how to shave my legs and hold the baby at the same time so I let her shriek in her crib. Even though I can hear her shrieks down the hall, I put the baby monitor in the bathroom and turned the volume to low just in case. Do you know what I figured out? I learned how to make feedback squelches with the baby monitor in the bathroom. All I have to do is swing the door back and forth. It was so loud you’d think I was tuning up for a rock concert. Testing… testing… one two three, ouch that hurt. I almost woke Toby up.
I’m lucky I don’t have to shave my legs very often. For some strange genetic reason I don’t grow very much hair on my legs. Less than most people grow on their arms. During pregnancy my hair didn’t grow at all. Very strange, I know. This is a good thing and I remind myself of it everything I start loathing my pear shape.
The next chore was changing the sheets. That actually turned into a lot of fun. I’ve learned that if I cheer and make all kinds of happy sounds, I can talk Baby Bug out of getting scared. Usually something like a giant piece of cloth coming at her from the sky would make her eyes widen, her bottom lip quiver and then all hell would break lose in the form of un-soothable cries. So I laid her on the bed (smack dab in the middle to avoid any flipping off, of course) and changed the sheets around her while clapping and shouting “Yaaay! This is fun!” over and over like a moron. She loved it. She was ecstatic when I whipped the sheets up into the air above her head and then let them settle softly on her skin. There were lots of baby laughs and gummy smiles. It was a riot. I almost wanted to make the bed over and over again.
Then came bath time. I wish I could give Baby Bug a bath while she was napping. It would be so much easier to get all the fuzz out of her hand cracks if she wasn’t clenching them up so tightly. And the scum in her neck folds? Sheesh! That’s nearly impossible. I really need to give her baths more often so she gets used to them. Right now we’re lucky if we get two a week. Mostly because in the morning and the evening it’s too cold and in the middle of the day the sun is shining into the kitchen window so brightly it blinds you. It’s never the right time to take a bath. I know, excuses excuses… I’m pathetic.
We managed the bath and she only cried a little bit. I love a nice clean baby. We put lotion and powder on (even though Toby hates anything that smells like anything) and then I carried her around for the rest of the day smelling her fuzzy head. That lasted until I stopped by a local taco joint for dinner and dropped a glop of salsa on her head. Way to go Mommy!
But all in all, it was a very successful day. Here’s to tomorrow!
