Mine mine mine, all mine

Pukefest

My mother thinks my son is lactose intolerant.

I think he just enjoys puking a lot. Charles, not surprisingly, agrees with my mother. "After all, she's raised three children," he helpfully informed me.

Apparently: "Lactose Intolerance is caused by a deficiency of lactase, an enzyme needed to absorb and digest milk sugar i.e. lactose. Undigested lactose lingers in the colon and ferments, creating intestinal distress - abdominal pain, bloating, gas and diarrhea - that sometimes defies diagnosis or is misdiagnosed as serious bowel disease."

There's some pleasant Monday-morning reading. I always enjoy drinking my morning coffee and daydreaming about colons, bloating and fermentation of milk in my child's intestines.

Problem is, Drew never seems uncomfortable after he drinks formula or breastmilk. He looks happy and smiley and squealy, and then out of nowhere, this curdled-looking, white goo slides out of his mouth and all over whatever is just below his chin, which is usually my hand or my arm.

It kind of looks like that scene in the 1986 remake of The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum regurgitates on a donut. (one of the prouder moments in his cinematic career, no doubt.)

And speaking of food, I found a solid food that Drew actually seemed to enjoy - sweet potatoes. Interestingly, eating sweet potatoes did not result in a torrent of orange goo, so maybe it is just the milk.

When I was single and childless, I never imagined myself spending the better part of a day contemplating another human being's upchuck and the various causes thereof.

The opposite of madness is not apathy, it's SANITY

Link: MSNBC - Mommy Madness.

This article is all the rage on the mommy blogs and message boards this week. While reading the article, which outlines how excruciatingly stressful some women find the job of motherhood, I started to wonder why I'm not having a breakdown. I mean, I work full-time, I have a child, I'm in my 30s, I was diagnosed with clinical depression years ago - I'm just ripe for a mental hospital!

The genius of this whole concept is that mothers who aren't having stress-induced meltdowns end up wondering what they are doing wrong. If I were truly a concerned mother, wouldn't I be just as overloaded as the women in this article? Is my lack of severe strain just a facade covering a deep wellspring of apathy?

Many of the message boards I've perused are just sickening in their self-righteous and congratulatory attitudes towards this topic. I see women actually competing over who is more exhausted, overtaxed, overburdened and overextended.

"After I finish working 14 hours, taking Junior to French class, Gymboree and the symphony, steaming his organic fruits and veggies, washing five loads of laundry by hand and cooking a perfect vegetarian, low-fat, low-carb meal, I'm really just kind of tired. I'm such a bad mother!"

Why are we fighting each other to prove that we are more mentally ill than anyone else?

So, here's my list of reasons why I'll never be Mad Mommy of the Year in the mental institution:

1. I work a normal eight-hour day.
2. My husband works a normal eight-hour day.
3. I buy food from the grocery store. I see no need to grow my own, when Publix grows it so well.
4. I make Hamburger Helper on a regular basis. It's fast and easy.
5. Occasionally, I let my son watch "Seinfeld" reruns on TV. He thinks Kramer is amusing.
6. Often, there are piles of laundry in my closet waiting to be washed. They will be there until I find time to wash them and THEY WILL LIKE IT.
7. I have not started a college fund for my child. I hope he's smart and/or plays really good football so he can get lots of scholarships.

One day, he will hate me

So I'm talking to a co-worker friend of mine yesterday, and she proceeds to scare the crap out of me by going into great detail about how very bad her teenage daughter is.

We're talking so bad that she's tempted to give her away to the first passing stranger. We're talking ready-to-disown-her kind of bad.

At first I'm thinking, "Gee, that really sucks," you know, in the manner of someone who feels sympathy but no real empathy because it's somebody else's problem? But then I realize, one day, Drew will be a teenager.

As someone who works in the social services field, I see a lot of teenagers. 

Teenagers are like an alien life form. They speak an alien language and their brains don't seem to work like normal human brains.

You tell a teenager, "Stop smoking crack or you're going to prison" and he hears, "Blah blah blah blah, crack, blah blah blah." Kind of like that Far Side cartoon with the dog.

OK, so then there's the fact that Drew contains my genes, which presumably means that some of my teenager genes are floating around in his DNA somewhere, just waiting for the right moment to spring into action.

This is not a good thing.

I was not a good teenager. I wasn't completely rotten, but I was definitely not good. So, if my parents' best dream comes true and I end up with a teenager exactly like myself, then I can expect Drew to:

• Skip curfew every night and not call
• Wreck his car
• More than once
• Smoke cigarettes
• Tell me he's going to a teen club and actually be going to a kegger at a house next door to the club
• Threaten to kill himself when he doesn't get his way
• Throw things at my head
• Ruin a family vacation to Disney World by making up various illnesses and pretending to be about to die from one of them
• and several other things I won't mention because my mom reads this blog and I don't want to disturb her any more than I did as a teenager

Now, even worse, Drew also contains some of Charles' teenager genes. Which ALSO means we can expect him to:

• Try to kill any siblings with a .22 and a claw hammer
• Get drunk, fall down and cut his head and explain it away to us by telling us some random guy tried to kill him
• Wreck his car
• More than once
• Taunt a drunk (and armed) redneck by showing him a pocket knife and saying, "I bet mine is bigger than yours!"

I'm afraid.

Arrest that woman!

Link: Mom Arrested For Smoking Around Her Kids.

In case you don't already know, smoking around children or infants or while pregnant is a hot-button issue with me. I went through hell to quit smoking (and stay quit) when I got pregnant, and by God, if a former two-pack-a-day-for-14-years smoker can do it, anybody can.

Now that I'm a mom and I know what it's like to be criticized on a daily basis about my mothering skills, you won't catch me offering unsolicited advice about breastfeeding, co-sleeping, attachment parenting, daycare, stay-at-home moms or any other issue that provokes unsought-after comments from other moms. (see below post for more details)

But I won't give up griping about smoking. Smoking while pregnant or around infants and children is one of the most selfish and destructive things a parent can do. If that sounds judgmental, that's because it is.

Games people play

Chez Miscarriage features a topic near and dear to many moms' hearts (as evidenced by the number of mommies commenting on her blog) - the perpetual one-upsmanship games that so many mothers play, attempting to make themselves appear perfect and make you look like the dumbest newbie of a mom who ever birthed a child.

So far, I've gotten sniped by my mother-in-law, no less than three co-workers, one of the Daycare People, some message board posters and a random stranger.

My mother-in-law has indicated, on the rare occasions when she deigns to speak to me, that:

1. I'm spoiling Drew by picking him up when he cries
2. I shouldn't still be breastfeeding him
3. Breastfeeding him is causing him to reject the bottle

One co-worker has told me that I should still be pumping breastmilk at work instead of feeding him formula during the day.

Another co-worker tells me that he should be weaned by now.

Yet another co-worker tells me that he should definitely be sleeping through the night by now and that I should just "let him cry" if he wakes up in the middle of the night.

A random stranger in a restaurant proceeded to inform me that "He has the colic!" because Drew was crying. I responded, very politely, that Drew was just a little cranky because he was tired, but the old geezer just kept saying "He has the colic! He has the colic!" over and over like a really crusty and annoying parrot. I think he was senile.

One of the Daycare People informed me that she stopped breastfeeding her son at 3 months. I call this "the stealth snipe." It doesn't sound like a snipe on its surface, but its whole purpose is to subtly convey to you that you're doing it all wrong and that, if you'd only listen to reason, you, too, could be a perfect mother, or at least a non-abusive one.

A message board poster indicated that I'm callously endangering the life of my only child by feeding him rice cereal in a bottle.

These people all need to leave me alone and especially quit talking about my breasts. It's very disconcerting.

Anyway, get out of here and go read the link.

Chortles

Drew is learning to laugh. Right now, he produces more of a cross between a chuckle and a chortle than an actual belly laugh, but he's definitely working on it.

Things that Drew finds funny:

• Daddy's face
• The cat
• His belly button
• Being tossed into the air
• Tummy Zerberts
• Dust (I can't figure out what else he could have been laughing at this morning)

Drew is also extremely interested in our food.

Last night, I finished feeding him his bottle and was holding him while I ate my own dinner. He kept grabbing at my food and then he'd fuss when I'd pull it out of his reach. I don't know what he thinks he was going to do with my dinner, but he really really wanted it.

I've read that interest in "grown-up" food is an indication that your baby might be ready for solids. But whenever a spoon touches Drew's tongue, he squinches his face up like we're trying to force-feed him lemons. Then he grabs the spoon and paints his hair with rice cereal, which, although very cute, isn't really providing him with any lasting nutrition, unless he can somehow absorb the food through some type of scalp osmosis.

Directionless

I've been trying to get Charles to put together our son's Exersaucer but he keeps giving me grief about having lost the directions.

This thing looks only slightly less complicated than a NASA space shuttle. Why do toy manufacturers insist on making parents go through this special kind of hell?

Big baby!

Drew is already well on his way to becoming a bona-fide man.

He gets a little cold and it's whine, whine, cry...all day long. "Hold me!" "Feed me!" "Entertain me!" "Me, me, me, me!"

I think there are certain things that veteran mothers don't tell other women about being a mom. I think they keep these things to themselves due to a fierce survival instinct - they know that mention of these...perks...would most likely cause women to forego childbearing ("uh...hell, no, I'm not doing that) which would thus eventually lead to a complete extinction of the human race.

One of these little secrets involves the massive amount of puke in which you, as a mom, will find yourself swimming on a daily basis.

You will discover the Mark of the Mom - an indelible vomit stain on the shoulder of every shirt that you own. You will experience the indescribable feeling of having throw-up in your hair, in your bra and trickling down your back. You will constantly exude an odor of sour milk.

When I was a mommy-to-be, I heard about the lack of sleep, the crying and the general fatigue - but nobody told me about the puke.

I probably wouldn't have believed them anyway.

Fever dreams

Last night, Drew had a fever.

My husband noticed that Drew felt a little warm, and said we should take his temperature.

What he meant was that I should take his temperature. My husband - who is in training to become a registered nurse - couldn't stick the thermometer up our son's butt.

I politely pointed out to him that, as a nurse's assistant, he spends most of his working time elbow-deep in other people's bodily emissions, and that, as a nurse, he will be conducting various and sundry invasive procedures upon total strangers.

It's not that he didn't see the hypocrisy, he just chose to ignore it.

So, the thermometer registered 101. That's a fever in any country.

Being the newbie first-time and slightly panicky parents that we are, we telephoned the on-call nurse at our pediatrician's office.  She was very pleasant, in the way of people who have answered the same questions over and over all day long and are really just tired and ready to go home but don't want to be rude because it could cost them their job.

I bet first-time mothers are the bane of pediatric nurses' existences. I've never been the bane of anybody's existence before, so it's a rather heady experience.

Before you ask, Drew is fine. His fever broke last night and he was as happy this morning as anyone can be who has repeatedly had a rectal temperature taken while they're trying to sleep.

Pillow fight

I noticed during this past week that the primary thing my husband and I argue about is who got the least amount of  sleep recently and who, therefore, is entitled to not have to wake up to take care of the baby.

Him: I only slept for three hours today. I'm really tired and I have to work all night tonight.

Me: Well, I had to stay up all last night with him because he has a cold and he couldn't breathe and he was cranky.

Him: I've really only had about 15 minutes of REM sleep in the past two weeks.

Me: Yeah? Well, I have had no REMs. Nope. None at all since Drew was born.

I'm thinking maybe I should start keeping a sleep diary, including dates, times and places, so that I can start winning these arguments. Because frankly, I'm usually too damn tired to remember when and for how long I've slept.

When I went to pick up Drew from daycare yesterday, one of the daycare people (I say that like it's a tribe - The Daycare People are omnivorous city-dwellers) had put a bib on him. Not a problem, except that the bib was pink and had the word "Princess" printed on it in large, pink letters.

And here I began to worry. I mean, after all, these people change his diaper like four times a day at least. Is it possible that they missed the fact that my Drew is not feminine Drew as in Drew Barrymore but masculine Drew as in Drew Carey? (well, yes, there may be some question about Mr. Carey's masculinity, but he's still biologically male)

I prefer to think that they just ran out of more masculine bibs - you know, the ones that say "STUD" - and they just stuck whatever they could find around his neck.  I wonder if it would damage his psyche if I called him Princess from now on?