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The Belated Birth Announcements
I finally mailed out Baby Bug’s birth announcements…. only ten weeks late.
Sigh.
I had such good intentions, addressing all my pretty pink envelopes weeks before she was born. A lot of good it did me. Toby and I couldn’t agree on the design of the announcement for the longest time and finally I just went ahead and had them printed without his approval because it was just plain getting embarrassing.
Many of my friend’s had babies around the same time and all their birth announcements decorate my refrigerator mocking me. I should have just done one of those automated photo cards… it would have been so much easier. It’s just that I’m a graphic artist! I have a reputation to uphold. I can’t not design something. That’s what I do for a living. So I finally banged it out and now it’s in the mail. Done. Phew!
It’s silly that there’s this unwritten rule that birth announcements need to be timely. I mean, I understand they need to “announce” the event and waiting a year doesn’t really help a baby’s introduction into the world. But still, why do you get a whole year to send thank you notes after you get married? I had tons of free time after I got married. If I was an over achiever, I could have gotten all my thank you notes done on the plane ride to my honeymoon! Hah! Gone are those days. I don’t even know the meaning of free time now. I know it’s been said a zillion times but it really is true that when you are a mom, it’s a major accomplishment to get a shower every day.
I’m lucky. Baby Bug takes a nap every morning just long enough for me to take the quickest shower on earth. I’ve taken a shower every single day since she was born (I think, there may have been one day I skipped when I was out in Hemet where it’s okay to stink). I have to! Ever since she was born I’ve been the stickiest, smelliest, most disgustingist I’ve ever been. That morning shower keeps me sane. I look forward to it.
So anyway, the announcements are out. (Yay!) If you’re family or a close friend on my short mailing list, you can expect it in your mailbox in the next few days. If you don’t get one, email me because I have this dreaded feeling I left some people out. Please forgive me! I’m an addle brained mom now. Plus, I ran out of envelopes. But I’ll get some more, one of these days.
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Happy Valentine’s Day!
I have so many things to blog about, I don’t even know where to start. The site is back up. That’s big news around here. I spent the last two days attached to my laptop with one hand and the baby with the other.
The hand that was attached to my laptop was typing into yahoo instant messenger to my new host couple who are the nicest people on the planet. They are not only hosting this site but they also walked me through step by step how to modify wordpress templates. Believe me, that’s a lot because I don’t understand a flip of CSS. I think C.S.S. stands for Crappy Site Stuff. But actually CSS is really cool and not crappy at all, except that I don’t understand it and I feel like a bungling fool. There are still so many things to fix. Like you’re probably wondering where all the spy emblems went. I still have them, don’t worry. I just have to figure out where to put them. The comments are saved too… they just haven’t decided to show up yet.
The other hand (that wasn’t attached to my laptop) was holding the baby to my boob. That was almost more of challenge than learning CSS. I should draw a cartoon of all the positions I go through to try to get Baby Bug to latch on. It could be like a kama sutra book but without the erotica.
We’ve tried it on the floor, we’ve tried it on my desk, we’ve tried the football hold and the cradle hold. We’ve tried it with the boppy and without the boppy. We’ve tried it in the dark, we’ve tried it in the light. We’ve tried it in every room in the house! It’s no use. When she makes up her mind that she’s going to be badger baby, there is just nothing you can do but wait it out. It’s almost like she gets traumatized by one failed attempt to latch on and then every single thing I try after that makes her scream because she’s remembering how awful failure is.
I feel so bad when she’s upset at me. They say you can’t spoil a baby before they are three months and it’s okay to pick them up when they cry. They say picking a baby up when it cries teaches them that they can trust you. So I’m thinking that Baby Bug is learning that she can’t trust me because every time I pick her up and try to nurse her, she has some kind of trauma. And if it’s not that, it’s the tummy ache that I must have given her by eating broccoli or something. I know she won’t remember this and she’s still learning that she can trust me but I still give myself major guilt trips every time she cries. I guess this is just part of motherhood.
But this post isn’t all about Baby Bug and our many nursing tribulations. It’s really supposed to be a lengthy thank you and ode of adoration to the Stranahans. They have been so wonderful to me these last few days. I thought I was indebted to the last guy who hosted this site for me. Now I really know the meaning of indebtedness. They stayed inside on a perfectly nice sunny day, probably ignored their kid’s pleas to go outside and play ball, and helped me put this mess of a website back together piece by piece. “Can I have three columns? No, can I have two? Can I put my archives in scroll bars? Can I have an image map in my masthead” etc. etc. etc… My requests are endless and of course I still have a wish list a mile long.
And another thing! One of those perfectly nice sunny days was the wife’s birthday. Get this: on her birthday, she chose to spend the day transferring files from my old ftp site to my new ftp site. Nice birthday present… um, to me! I know. I should be banished to a corner somewhere.
So do you think they will let me pay them for all their hours and hours of labor and patience with me? Not to mention server space and bandwidth? NO! I have to be creative and think up some sneaky way to thank them. I will. I have to.
