BrooklynGirl

Cycles

I got my period over the weekend and for the first time in six years that means...absolutely nothing.  I'm not digging out the thermometer or the pee sticks.  I'm not calling the RE or filling my prescriptions for Clomid or Lupron.

Once upon a time, without any planning or forethought, I imagined that I would have three children.   I came from a two child family and when I was growing up, I admired the chaos and energy of larger families.

Now, well...I'm not ready to give up wondering about another child altogether, but I'm too consumed by my life right now to think about that very much.  It's like Tom Hanks' character at the end of Cast Away, carrying around the bottles of water with him regardless of whether he's actually thirsty.  Having gone without the water for so long, he still needs to know it's there.

With my history, staring down the barrel of 39, I don't know if my fertility is still there.  If I wake up tomorrow and decide that having another child is what I want most in the world, I don't know whether it will be possible.

So, perhaps getting my period doesn't mean nothing.  Maybe it means maybe.  Someday.  Maybe.

Operation ME*

Next week, I become a freelance editor for real.  The sitter will watch The Girl on Monday and Tuesday mornings while The Boy is at school.  It's 10 hours of babysitting, and I should be able to break even with 8 hours of work per week (after taxes).

There's some work in the pipeline, but I don't know how regular it will be. I'm going to give it a shot for 6 weeks or so and re-evaluate.  If nothing else, I'll be a more regular blogger.

It's amazing how much emotion has gone into the contemplation of this relatively paltry amount of time away from The Girl.  She's entered a renewed stranger anxiety phase so there  will no doubt be tears on Monday--hopefully from only one of us.

*Mommy Employment

Sentences I Never Thought I'd Say

Tonight at dinner:

"No, you can't have any more apple sauce until you eat one of your tater tots."

Yes, they're organic, no trans fat tater tots, but they're still tater tots.  Lunchables here we come!

On the Go

When The Boy was a colicky baby,  I would often grouse to my friends about how hard the newborn phase was.  "But it'll get better!" I chirped in the end, eager to demonstrate that the girl who was so desperate to have a baby was indeed happy to have a baby.

Invariably, one of my been-there-done-that mom friends would shoot back, "This is the easy part--just you wait until he can move."

I would chuckle and pretend to be amused while contemplating homicide.  The last thing I wanted to hear when I was so strung out and overwhelmed was that it could get worse.

But of course, there was truth to the dire predictions.  Yes, he started sleeping more and crying less, but all too soon he was mobile and all over the place: pulling books off the book shelves, gnawing on the wheels of the stroller, getting trapped under the coffee table.  It was tiring in a whole new way.  There was no respite of a moment or two in a bouncy seat, a swing, an exersaucer, a jumperoo; it was free range Boy all day long.

Regrettably, The Girl has entered that same phase.  From the moment she awakes, she is on the go.  In the crib, she pulls herself to a stand, which she loves until she realizes she doesn't (yet) know how to get down on her own (this is especially fun at 1 am.  And 2 am.  And 4 am).   She scoots from one end of the apartment to the other in record time, pausing only to chew on something she shouldn't be touching much less eating.

What made this stage  bearable with The Boy was the tot lot, a small  playground  nearby designed for crawlers and early walkers.  We were there 2-3 times a day, and The Boy would wear himself out enough that he'd generally sack out in the stroller on the way back so I could fortify myself  with an iced mocha.

It's been too chilly for The Girl to enjoy the tot lot, but I hope that will change this week.  And I hope that more outside play time will tucker her out.  And I hope that more standing practice will help her learn to sit down.  But mostly I hope that all of this will happen before my husband leaves town on Thursday.  Oh, how I hope.

(Kinda) Working for a Living

I thank you for your thoughts on working.  I knew you'd get it.  In the last few days, people have started returning my calls and emails, I've signed on to a new (small, short-term) project for an existing client, and a blogger who shall remain anonymous until she's given me permission to call her out and sing her  praises out has referred a possible new client my way.

So I'm not quite as invisible as I was.

One thing I've been kicking around is the notion of "being economically dependent on a man."  It didn't even occur to me that I was until I read Cat's comment,  which is curious (no harm, no foul Cat).  I just hadn't really thought of it in precisely those terms, and I think I have something further to say about it, but I don't know what it is yet.

However, on a slightly related topic (ahem!), The Husband and I saw Macbeth last night.  Man, is that a different play to a former (and always?) infertile woman who has delivered two children by cesarean section than it was to a  high school sophomore!    Has anyone reading seen this particular production and/or have a hankering to talk about Shakespeare?

(Not) Working for a Living

As happens from time to time in these parts, I've started to think again about work. 

I am just happier when I'm doing something outside the home.  I have sympathy for parents who have to work for financial reasons but really would prefer not to, but I'm on the other side of that: I'm struggling to find a job that pays me enough that I can work.    And it's humbling: to be a 38-year old who used to think of herself as an overachiever who can't find a job that pays at least $18/hour after taxes.* 

Part-time teaching last year was emotionally and intellectually rewarding,  but financially challenging, and regardless, my position, which was funded by discretionary spending, no longer exists.  There's private tutoring, which can pay $50 per hour and up, but after school/early evening would be a complicated time to be away from home, and I'm not really sure how to break in to that racket anyway.

So, I'm back to editing--ideally freelance and from home.  From time to time I apply for jobs on craigslist or wherever, and if I do get a response, the job is invariably in-house and pays $10/hour.  In a fit of industriousness, I recently reached out to former colleagues in an attempt to network and the response rate has been discouraging.  Professionally, I feel just about invisible.

I'm try to live in the moment and just savor this time with the kids--the mornings in the park, the  early evenings in the bath (they have begun sharing a bath and though it's wet and messy, it's generally hilarious), the occasional joys of the synchronous nap--and I know that it's okay to not have another job right now.   

But I worry that I will never work again, that in 5 years they will be in school and child care will be less of a struggle, and I will be 43 and invisible.  And it scares me.   

*This is my current sitter's hourly rate--assuming we could find a mutually workable schedule.  There are less expensive sitters out there, but this is the general ballpark for taking care of two kiddos in my neighborhood.

Size Matters

Often, when people see The Girl, they comment on her size.  "Oh, she's big!" they say and  take note of her full cheeks or ample thighs.  Since I still tote her around in the Ergo when I can't bear to load her and The Boy into the double stroller, I'm well aware of how heavy she feels.

As I've noted before, I'm not a small girl myself so I believe a certain amount of pudge comes with the genes.  Also, The Boy was on the receiving end of the same comments when he was her age so it wasn't out of left field.

But because The Girl is, well, a girl,  I worried more.  Or worried differently.  With The Boy, it seemed like comments about his size were compliments: see, you're doing a good job as a parent; he's growing...a lot.  With The Girl, I'm not so sure.  "What do you feed her?" people sometimes ask, and what I hear is them asking if she's on a steady diet of french fries and Ring Dings.

So, I was curious to have The Girl weighed at her 9 month visit today:  she is 22 lbs, 12 oz, and 29 inches long.  The doctor plotted these numbers on the  height/weight percentile chart and reported that she was in the 25th-50th percentile for both.  "Huh, she  seems bigger than that," she commented.

I agreed and we weighed  and measured her again, but the numbers were the same.  I hate to say it, but part of me was relieved: 25th-50th percentile means she's small; not too small, but smallish. Appropriately small.   Never have to worry that the store doesn't carry a size 16 small.  But as I left the office and wandered home, the percentiles didn't make sense: she's wearing 12-18 month clothing now.  If she's in the 50th percentile and none of the clothes for her age fit her,  then who actually wears those clothes?

After I got the kids down for the night, I entered the info in several online height/weight calculators and found percentiles that make sense:  she's actually in the 90th  percentile for height and weight on the 9 month charts.  I think the doctor must have been using the 12 month chart to come up with the 25th-50th percentile calculation.

Of course, now I'm embarrassed for that moment of relief at The Girl's purported smallness.  She's healthy; she's happy; she's sleeping.  Nine months is too early to start worrying about clothing size.

Now I'm off to stock up on french fries and Ring Dings for tomorrow's lunch.  Ha.

March Miracle

A week ago, before this insanity, we moved The Girl into The Boy's room.   I was filled with trepidation: The Girl was still waking up several times a night and if she was left to cry long enough, The Boy would hear her and rouse himself.  But the husband and I were spent.  We'd been sleeping on the pull out (and/or the floor) since the beginning of January.  It was time for Something To Happen.

So, we moved in the crib, turned up the white noise machine, and hoped for the best.

Amazingly (and yes, I know it invites disaster to commit these words to the Web), The Girl has slept through the night 3 times in the last week.  The first morning she did it, I was lying awake in bed (oh, sweet bed!) trying to hear her breathe on the monitor when I heard The Boy start chattering away, as he often does, usually imagining a conversation with Thomas or Percy or Sir Topham Hatt. 

Then I heard him say, "Good morning!  Did you have a good rest?  Did you have good dreams?"  He was talking to The Girl!

I opened the door to their room, and there he was, sitting up and peering over at her, while she lay on her belly, craning her neck as far as she could over the crib bumper to beam at her brother.  Maybe it was the giddiness of a full night's sleep, but I just about melted into a puddle of maternal goo on the spot.

The apartment feels  several times bigger than it has in months.

The Voice of Experience

The other day my husband and I were talking about all the ways The Girl suffers from second child syndrome: we don't take enough pictures of her, give her hand-me-down toys from her brother instead of new things we've picked out specifically for her, don't consult the baby book every five minutes to make sure she's doing (and we're doing) all the appropriate things.  Compared to the attention we gave The Boy, it almost feels like neglect.

Then, The Girl fell off the bed. When The Boy had a similar injury, I rushed him to the ER and (if you can believe it) insisted he have a CAT scan, but this time, though I was mortified, I was calm. She wailed and had an ugly looking red spot on her head, but was generally fine within minutes: good color, no vomiting, behaving as though nothing had happened. This seemed to be the upside of second child syndrome: slightly less psychotic parents.

Fast-forward 15 hours: it was the middle of the night and The Girl was inconsolable. She wouldn't sleep, wouldn't take a bottle, and wouldn't nurse, and I thought—no, didn't think but knew without the slightest doubt—that this was all evidence of the traumatic brain injury* she had suffered when she fell and I had been too busy congratulating myself on my accomplished parenting to take her to the ER.

My husband and I tag teamed through the night, but when the sun came out she was no better. My pediatrician's office wouldn’t be open for 3 more hours, and I was in full blown panic mode and doubting anyone would return a call before then so off we went to the ER.

The doctor who saw us was very nice, but when I couldn't even find the spot on her head from the fall, he gave me the look—you hypochondriacal parents out there know the look—that said I was a fool. He did a quick exam, looked in her ears (to make sure last week's ear infection wasn't to blame), and sent us on our way.

The diagnosis? Um, probably teething. 

So much for experienced parenting.

 *Specifically, I believed she had an epidural hematoma, a diagnosis I was qualified to make because I had seen it on Grey’s Anatomy.

Comparison Shopping

The Boy is obsessed with apple sauce--he can  finish a 23 oz jar in one sitting if  left to his own devices.   I tend to  buy Santa Cruz, because it's unsweetened and organic and because we are always running out of it, I tend to buy it everywhere.  Since it's something we absolutely, positively must have, I have tended not to focus too much on the price: it costs  what it costs.

Recently, though, I started paying attention and couldn't believe the difference.  Here are the prices for the same jar of apple sauce bought around the neighborhood over the period of a month (with the exception of the first place, all these stores are within a 6 block radius):

Fresh Direct:     $2.49
C-Town: $2.99
Union Market: $4.49
12th Street Market: $4.99
Village Market: $5.99