Geektastic

I wrapped up my first week back at work. It wasn’t really “back at work” since I was working from home, and it wasn’t a full week, since we have a 4 day weekend for the holiday, but whatever. I was up in my bedroom working while the nanny was watching Moira.

It was pretty great to be able to take breaks to go see my girl, and not have to worry about the tedious stuff like feeding her, changing diapers, dealing with crying and figuring out what to do during her 4-6 hours worth of naps. It sucked to have to be on a conference call while they went on a walk or played downstairs…

But I survived!

Today it was just me and Mo again, just like old times. I had to wash the bottles myself and everything. She’s been in a pretty good mood, so that’s good, but she has grown to hate her bouncy chair. Luckily she still likes the activity mat, because that’s now the only thing that will keep her occupied for any period of time. Well, there’s the swing, but that pretty much just puts her right to sleep.

I think she doesn’t like the chair because she can’t kick her legs, which has been her favorite activity for several weeks now. Unfortunately I don’t think she has good enough head/neck control for a jumperoo/exersaucer yet, so we’re kind of stuck. And tummy time is a nightmare.

Anyway, back to the nanny. She’s great! To me, she already feels like a member of the family. Of course, every time Mo smiles at her, I’m overcome with jealousy, but what can you do? Mo will smile at people who aren’t me. It will happen.

With Mo’s schedule right now, the nanny is here for 3-4 hours of awake time and 5 hours of naptime, which is both a pretty easy gig and a one that I absolutely could not do for someone else’s baby. Let’s face it – I can barely do it for my own baby.

So all in all, I’m happy to be back to work. I hope Mo won’t hold it against me.

I have a week and a half left of maternity leave, so of course now is when I would start to feel really comfortable going out and doing things with Mo. We have our schedule more or less in place, with three naps a day, so now if she misses one nap, I don’t feel like everything is going to go to shit. So that gives me a 3-4 hour window in which I feel comfortable going out.

Yesterday I took Mo for her first trip to the big city to go meet Jay for lunch. We visited his office so all his co-workers could meet her and marvel at how adorable and alert she is, and then ate in Millennium Park while the CSO was practicing. Pretty nice! Today we went shopping with my mom and tomorrow we have a playdate. It’s nice to not feel like a shut-in anymore.

I do think I’m ready to go back to work, though. It helps that I think the nanny we found is so amazing, and she’s coming to our house, and she will handle Mo’s schedule exactly how I tell her to. And maybe wash some bottles and do some laundry while she’s here. I probably wouldn’t feel the same if I had to send Mo to a daycare center. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and we may have to do that at some point… But for now, I am really happy that Mo will be in her familiar house, getting one on one attention.

Not that I don’t love spending time with Mo, but being with her all day, every day has made me a bit neurotic. I obsess over the stupid mundane details, like when is the EXACT right time to put her down for a nap or how much time should I spend directly interacting with her versus letting her play on her own or why did she eat half an ounce less than she normally does? At work, I can control all the little details, but babies are so unpredictable. I think if I can take a step back and let the nanny handle the tedious stuff, I will be able to enjoy Mo even more than I already do.

I do wish I could work from home more than just one day a week, though. It would be nice to be able to step away from work for a few minutes at a time to visit her… Or take her on a walk at lunchtime. It would also be nice to not have to spend 2 hours a day in my car. Oh well… A girl can dream…

A friend from college came by this week to meet Mo for the first time. Now, I know better than anyone that people without kids sometimes have a hard time coming up with things to say about new babies. I’ve been there. I am not a baby person, and I have never pretended to be. However. I would think that it would be obvious that “She’s not pretty” is a completely inappropriate thing to say to a new mom about her baby girl. I don’t care what kind of backpedaling, feminist bullshit excuse you try to come up with, it’s just not right. Friend, if you’re reading this, I forgive you but you need to seriously work on your tact. But you know this already, right?

And yesterday, my mom was babysitting while I had a doctor’s appointment. She tells me that while she was feeding Mo, she sneezed or coughed or whatever, which startled the baby. Mo doesn’t like to be startled, so she cried. This happens often, especially when Mo is groggy while eating. My mom, however, thinks that Mo needs to toughen up, so she decided to randomly BARK at my daughter while feeding her, to get her used to loud noises. I mean, it’s a wonder I didn’t end up a serial killer.

Kane County Chronicle | Breast-feeding rally draws crowd in DeKalb.

Ugh. That shop owner is horrible. Forgive me if anything in my last post seems to support that lump of crap. There’s nothing sexual about breast feeding, and if he sees it that way, it’s clearly his own personal perversion.

And property rights? Gross. I can’t believe I came out on the side of a libertarian. I need to go wash out my brain now…

Public breast-feeding – Chicago Tribune.

So, I am totally on board with women’s right to breastfeed in public. I don’t mind seeing boobs, and I think people who do mind are sexualizing something that is not at all sexual and should generally shut the fuck up.

However. As a bottle-feeding mother, I’m not sure what series of events would have to happen to have me bust out the formula in the middle of a small business. Who wants to eat their lunch in the middle of a used record store? Not Mo, I know that.

Perhaps the owner didn’t object to the boobage as much as he objected to the loitering… You are taking up valuable space in the owner’s business while your kid eats lunch. Should we just all bring sack lunches while we shop? Picnic at the Walmart? Do you really need to shop for used records so badly that you can’t take a lunch break for your baby?

Like I said, I’m not against public breastfeeding. But I think this lady maybe should try to be a little more sympathetic to the shop owner. A shop, after all, is not necessarily a “public place.” It’s a privately-owned place, where someone is trying to make a living…

I finally called the nanny’s references! Thank god they turned out to be glowing recommendations, since I have to go back to work in a little over 3 weeks, and I’d be in serious shit if I had to start over on the nanny search. Especially since I love ours so much – it would be tough to live up to my expectations.

One of the few bright spots in not being able to sell our house is that we can afford a nanny for Mo instead of sending her to a daycare. Obviously I don’t have any problem with daycare centers, but if you can get one-on-one attention for your infant, I think that’s the way to go. When she gets older, I’ll want her to socialize with people her age, but for now, I’m happy having her at home. And a nanny will follow our feeding and naptime schedule better. And maybe do some household chores.

That last part was definitely not a requirement for a nanny, but ours seems eager to help out around the house, and who am I to argue? I know better than anyone how boring it can be to watch an infant. Especially one that naps for 5+ hours a day. (Note: whenever I mention Mo’s excellent napping, she immediately wakes up and cries for an hour. Some kind of voodoo.)

Aaanyway, we found our nanny through Care.com. There is a monthly fee, but it was totally worth it. I could browse through hundreds of potential nannies or post a job listing. We never posted a job – just contacted a few who seemed good. I initially contacted 3 women, and only 2 wrote back. We had interviews with those two, and chose the second one. Care.com ran a background check and attempted to contact the references. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to reach the references, so that part was kind of a bust. I’m not sure how hard they really tried, since both references called me back within an hour. I probably would have wanted to call them myself anyway. (That’s a lie. I hate calling people, especially people I don’t know.)

It sounds pretty bad that we only interviewed 2 potential nannies, but the one we found was so perfect, interviewing more would have been a waste of time. She’s a 50 year old Polish woman who was a nurse/midwife in Poland. She is friendly and loves babies and likes to do housework. It’s costing us a buttload, but it’s still cheaper than that mail order bride I was looking at…

So after switching Mo’s formula to one with added rice, we seemed to fix the reflux issue, but created a pooping issue. So we watered down the formula, and her pooping only got a little better, but the reflux maybe started bothering her again? And then she was too uncomfortable to nap, so we also had to deal with over-tiredness. Yikes. All I know is I spent Memorial Day fighting through some of the worst screaming and crying I’ve ever heard.

The doctor says this is most likely just regular fussiness that she’ll grow out of in a month or two. A MONTH OR TWO? How would I ever be able to handle another 30-60 days like yesterday? That is some seriously disconcerting news. Thank god she seems to have an automatic off switch that goes off at 8 p.m. She had a good night of sleep (I got close to 8 hours of sleep!) and she has been napping well today. Right now she’s 2 hours and 15 minutes into her afternoon nap, and I’m once again having to decide whether to wake her up to keep her on schedule or let her sleep…

Why can’t she just sleep the exact amount I expect her to?

So I’ve seen this Il Volo group on a couple of shows in the last few weeks… They are currently on Ellen, and I have to say, I am not buying what they’re selling. Every once in a while, one of these crappy acts pops up, and they somehow manage to get plastered all over tv based on their foreign-ness or some shit. Rock-and-roll violin guy, I’m looking at you.

I think all it takes to get on these shows is a eurotrash wardrobe and an anachronistic music genre. And a really good manager, obvs. I mean, don’t get me wrong, rock-and-roll violin guy is an excellent violinist. Il Volo seems to be better than average at opera. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like either of these types of music. You think you’re going to trick me by having it performed by a good looking young man? HECK NO.

Of course the ironic part is that I will gladly watch UNTALENTED good-looking young men sing POP music, no matter how god-awful the song is. Whatever. I’m complicated. Or rather: I’m American. It doesn’t have to be good for me to like it. I like cheese whiz too.

Good news: Mo started sleeping through the night this weekend!
Related news: She is making up for the missed feeding by eating 6 oz per feeding during the day.
Bad news: Her stomach is not 6 oz big, so now we seem to be dealing with reflux.

Fuck.fuck.fuck.

She hasn’t really napped in 2 or 3 days, and she is fussy almost all day. Somehow it hasn’t seemed affect her nighttime sleep yet. I’m hoping we can fix this before that becomes a problem.

Blah.

The problem with figuring out how to get Mo to take her naps is that SHE SLEEPS MOST OF THE TIME. We are on a 3 to 3-1/3 hour schedule, so she wakes up, eats and plays for the first hour to hour and a half. Then she sleeps for 2 hours. This is pretty much the kind of schedule I’ve read about being recommended for a baby her age. But: it. is. so. boring.

I wanted to take a long walk today because it’s so nice outside, so she skipped her 3-5 p.m. nap, and now she’s overtired and won’t go to sleep for her 6-8 p.m. nap. So I’m sitting here feeling guilty that I put my desire for a walk ahead of her need for sleep, and also afraid that she will cry for the rest of the night (has never happened, ridiculous concern). In trying to keep her in the appropriate 14-15 hours of sleep per day, I am becoming a slave to her nap times. I am starting to miss regular adult interaction, which is saying a lot for someone as introverted as I am. It took me 6 weeks to get to this point, but I am secretly (not so secretly) looking forward to going back to work and letting the nanny deal with the naps. I know I’ll feel differently when I’m sitting in my hideous beige cubicle while she’s learning to roll over and crawl, but I never thought sitting at home for 3 months could induce so much anxiety in me.

Anyway, I probably shouldn’t just use this space to complain about her non-existent sleeping problems every day. She’s a great sleeper and is close to sleeping through the night, so it really is just me obsessing over nothing. She also has started smiling — huge, open-mouthed, toothless smiles that make me want to cry because she is the cutest thing ever. So you see, this staying at home business is really not as horrible and unfulfilling as I might make it sound.