Scenes from a Saturday

It’s Saturday morning, and I am on my work laptop. The last two days I have been at the office, working hard as one of my staff is leaving, and while I am eager to focus on family again, there are a few nagging items I can’t get out of my mind. I send off a few emails, interrupted here and there by my toddler who is hungry for breakfast.

…

I get my daughter dressed in her bear suit so we can run some errands. We head outside in the late morning, her bundled in her stroller and me wondering how navigating the snowy sidewalks will be today. I am relieved and happy to be done with work and spending time with my daughter, experiencing our weekly reconnection day after my time away. I am getting ready for a party and I need to stop at the grocery store and the bakery.

…

I have all 4 stove tops going – pancakes for breakfast, bacon, broccoli, and pasta for the mac and cheese I will bring to the party. My daughter is alternately playing on her own and clinging to my leg as I work. My husband is sleeping after a late night out with friends. I peek in on him to tell him breakfast will be ready soon and ask him to help out.

…

Our daughter is dressed and ready to go and I have packed up the stroller with the cake and mac and cheese. The party has already started and we are not yet out the door. My husband is moving slowly, his body showing how drained he feels.

“Do you have to go?” he asks. We embrace and I feel him curl into me, how genuine his pleading for me to join him in staying in our nest, ignoring the world and its demands together.

I had wanted for him to accompany us to the party, but I decide not to push, instead asking if he still wants to go out after. We had arranged a babysitter and were planning on a date, but I could tell he was in the mood to stay in. “I don’t really want to do anything at all,” he says, confirming my suspicions. I understand all too well how he is feeling – the sense that any effort at all is too much, that nothing could be rewarding enough to make it worth it. It’s not true, of course. But I know how true it can feel, when you’re there, in that place.

I pause. “Let’s at least get dinner, just the two of us,” I say. “We can always come home afterwards.”

He agrees.

…

As I push the stroller around the building and roll it up the stairs, careful not to wake my sleeping toddler, I hear the buzz of the party inside the building. The voices of adults mingle with the squeals and cries of children. I open the door and enter the space, looking around at the gathered families. Here are my daughter’s best friends, my best mom friends (though the “mom” qualifier is no longer needed), and their spouses, all gathered together to mark the occasion of our children’s first birthdays. It is a room filled with love and support, I know, and yet as I enter with my sleeping child I can’t help but feel a bit alone.

I roll the stroller with my daughter to a spot in the back, where she is somewhat removed from the din but we can see when she wakes. With a sigh, I note that I am 45 minutes late for a 2 hour party. After getting settled, I snap a picture of my sleeping daughter, and send it to my husband.

“So far, she is sleeping through the party. Your daughter, much? ;)”

…

Once she wakes up, she is a joy. We have some food and talk with our friends. Then we all get together for a group photo of the moms and babies. As we laugh and smile and look at any of the many cameras in the hands of the many dads, I know that this will be a picture I will cherish – we will capture a moment, but it will call to mind so many more, of emails and texts and afternoons together in the park or indoors, of home cooked scones and pot luck dinners, of watching our children make their first friends, with each other.

During the group shot with the fathers, a few of us step out of the frame. My daughter and I run back and forth in the large space, enjoying the music.

…

Someone who generously watched my daughter in addition to their own just the day before returns a sippy cup that I had left behind at their house. My daughter wants to drink from it, and I let her carry it, then lose track of it again in the sea of children’s things that is our celebration of ten 1 year olds and their moms and dads.

…

We are cleaning up, putting away furniture and sweeping the floor. The babysitter has picked up my daughter and is on her way to our apartment. I have messaged my husband, but heard nothing. I guess that he has fallen asleep and will wake when the babysitter arrives. I make the most of the time, chatting with the friends who remain and helping out. A boy, the older sibling of one of my daughter’s friends, brings the sippy cup to the mom I am standing next to. She tells me he thought it was hers because her daughter was drinking from it too.

“No worries,” I say as I put the bright pink and yellow cup in the pocket of my oversized coat, thankful at this moment for the coat and its large pockets. The coat is too big and not very flattering. I wore it last winter when I was in my third trimester, and I continue to wear it now so that I can close it around my daughter and I when she is in the wrap. It has dried finger paint on the hem from my encounters with not-quite-dry toddler art, and crumbs and specks of food from her snacks in the wrap. It is, as my boss put it, a “mom coat.” I probably should get a nice fitted coat for myself, but I just couldn’t bring myself to invest the money and time in the hunt for the right winter coat this year. I am not focused on that part of me. I am a mom first, and everything else after. It’s how I want it to be.

…

My pace quickens as I see my husband walking towards me on the street. I feel weird, like a train off the tracks, as I walk towards him without our daughter in sight. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve gone out without our daughter in the 14 months since she was born. As the two of us draw closer, I am giddy with happy memories – a decade of dinners for two, conversations both deep and light, games and trips and weekends in.

We embrace excitedly, sharing a big hug and a kiss, even though we’d just seen each other a few hours earlier. I lean into him as we walk, an extra skip in my step. As we hold hands and chat about where to go for dinner, I am relieved to hear more energy in his voice and feel more strength in his walk.

We choose to eat at Le Cheile, where we had our first dinner out as a new family of 3 a little over a year earlier and where we have been since many times, instead of Saggio, the fancy but cramped Italian restaurant where we ate our last dinner out as a childless couple. We are creatures of habit and comfort, and they have delicious mozzarella sticks.

…

I sit on a bench in the park, my legs awkwardly stretched in front of me on the deep blanket of snow. My husband sits across from me, helping me light the joint I just rolled as we talk about family size and when to have another child. I am enjoying myself, and I tell him so. It feels nice to be able to focus on each other and not worry about what our daughter is up to.

My throat feels dry, and I think a drink would be great. Then I interrupt our conversation – “I’m about to have a very mom moment. Are you ready for this?” I ask as I reach into my pocket and pull out the sippy cup. “Want some water?” I ask, thinking of all the people involved in making this drink turn up in my pocket on this particular day.

I smile, feeling immense love as I talk with my husband.

What a great day.

Happy 13 Months

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I took the time to write. So many things have been going on – a reorganization at work, Husband started a new job, the holidays and family visits, and my daughter’s first birthday!

She seems more and more like a toddler these days. She walks well, even being able to catch her balance after wobbling on one leg, standing from sitting, and balancing in a squat while she plays on the floor.

Lately she is all about the couch, and she can now get up and down safely in her own. She likes to crawl around on it or to grab the Wii U remote and play with the touchscreen. She’s taken a liking to her Elmo doll. We do watch a little bit of TV, and when I turned on sesame street she was blown away to see Elmo on the TV. She turned to me, back to the TV, back to me, as if to say “Did you know about this?”

She has a handful of words, and babbles all the time. She regularly says Dada, Mama, cat (“atttt” or “tttttt”), up, all done (“aaaaahl duh”), that, this, and yes (“ess”). She has also said book, bye bye, towel, and bed. The other day or cat had climbed up to a shelf in the closet, and her Dada was holding hey up so that she could see. She was amazed to see the cat there, and said “(c)at up”.

She is so much fun. She loves music and physical play and investigating objects. She puts rings on pegs and is working on the shape sorter, sometimes getting the shapes through and other times getting frustrated when she is trying to put a circle through a square hole.

We love her so much. It’s been such an amazing 13 months with her.

Learning to walk

My daughter turned 11 months old this week. On her 11 month birthday, she took her first tentative steps, and then yesterday she walked all the way across the room. It was so exciting to watch!

She had been very stable at standing for several weeks, and had even started rising and sitting without holding onto anything. She loved to walk holding our hands, but if she wanted to get across the room she would sit and crawl.

I felt that she had the strength and balance needed to walk, and all she was missing was the confidence. Her Dad agreed that she was scared to try. So we decided to encourage her to walk with just one of our hands. Whenever we did this, she would be upset at first, reaching for the other hand so she could speed up, but we encouraged her to try it. For a day or two, she did most of her walking this way, more slowly and tentatively than when she had two helping hands.

Then, on her 11 month birthday, while
I was sitting on the floor behind her, her standing with my arms nearby, her Daddy walked into the room and she took a couple of steps towards him! Then she grabbed my hands and we all cheered and encouraged her. She did the same thing again a few times that evening.

The next day, with encouragement she took a few more steps throughout the day. By the evening she was able to take about 10 steps, toddling across the room! She seems less scared to try now, though crawling is still her preferred method. This morning when I was getting ready for work I asked her to take a few steps to show her new skill to the nanny, and she walked towards me with a little more confidence.

I’m so proud of her for giving walking on her own a try even though she was hesitant. I can’t wait for the next chance to encourage her to persevere, despite her fears!

On working part time

Last night was my company Holiday party. At the end of the workday, my coworkers and I bundled into our winter coats and set off to walk together towards the Hudson River, our destination an event space called Studio 450, on the 12th floor of a building in the west 30s. After waiting for a ride up in the elevator, we were greeted at the door by servers offering a signature drink (the Mathematician, themed after our company’s work), and walked into a two floor space with views of the NY and NJ skyline all around us. I spent part of the night downstairs with the music and food, and part of the night upstairs at tables with Cards Against Humanity set out, letting loose with what was mostly the engineering cohort.

Many times, I reflected on how different this was from my first Holiday Party with this company, when we had 140 people worldwide and only one Manhattan office. Now we are up to 600 people, about 450 of them spread across our (temporarily) 3 Manhattan offices. There were so many faces I didn’t know, and yet I still felt a strong sense of kinship with all of these people.

I would often bump into people that I don’t work with day to day, and one question would come up often: “So, are you back full time now?”

To which I would smile and say, “Nope.”

It’s been roughly a year since I negotiated with my boss that when I returned from maternity leave, it would be part time. We didn’t put an end date on it, we just said we’d continue to check in to evaluate how it was going. I feel incredibly thankful for the arrangement that I have. It is wonderful to maintain my professional self, and yet to spend 5 days a week home with my daughter, watching her grow and change and just being there for her.

Professionally, there have certainly been some sacrifices. I am not in the office everyday, so I miss face time and less import meetings, and I have to sometimes take a sidelines role in projects I’d like to be more involved in. Whereas I once saw all company outings as a chance to network and thereby increase my effectiveness and enjoyment of work, last night was typical of where I’m at now – I darted out at 8:30 upon hearing that my daughter was hysterical, saying “Mama” and signing for milk but rejecting the bottle. I barely slept last night, but my reasons differ from most of my peers.

But it’s so worth it. I have decades to continue to build my career. I am so lucky to keep it moving along while I spend the time with my daughter now.

8.5 month snapshot

My daughter is about 8 and a half months old. I rarely have time to really sit and write, but I’m going to try to save a bit of memory here.

I’m writing now on my way to work. I am still going to work twice a week, on Thursdays and Fridays. It’s getting very hard to work at home. I try to do 3 hours on Monday and 3 hours on Wednesday.

My daughter doesn’t nap much. I hear from other moms about these 2 hour naps or a 45 minutes nap being short and it sounds like some other world. I am not upset about it, it is what it is. I try to extend her naps sometimes… Nurse or rock or sing or stroll, hoping she’ll go back to sleep. But it’s just not her. Once she’s up, she thinks things are too interesting to miss. I noticed this about her several months ago and it hasn’t changed. Another mom that watched her for an afternoon confessed that she thought with her practice and success with her own daughter that surely she’d be able to extend my daughter’s nap when she was up after 20 minutes, and was surprised to learn she was wrong.

I think long naps just aren’t in my daughter’s nature right now and that’s ok. But it does mean those 3 hours of work I try to do at home must be with her mostly awake. And now she gets into things so easily. She’s a pro at crawling and she pulls up to standing. Sometimes she even let’s go with one or both hands. She takes some tumbles most days but jumps right back into trying after a brief cuddle and reassurance. She is fearless! Her propensity to explore her physical skills is much more like me than her father.

One day last week she stood on her own. It was a very wide stance. We were on the grass where there was a slight Hill, she was pushing up and the next thing I knew nothing was on the ground but her feet. I sort of stared at her dumbfounded and proud.

As we approach the marker of her time outside the womb equalling her time in it, I’ve also been reflecting on my own changes over this time. I gained around 45 pounds with the pregnancy. I was nervous about if I would return to my former shape, but also so happy to be a mom that I felt it would be worth it even if not, so I wasn’t stressing. I also felt that modelling healthy behavior was important. And with breastfeeding and the activity involved in caring for an infant in NYC, the pounds melted off, slowly but surely. I was able to fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans at about 7 months post-partum, and now I even need a belt for those. It’s so remarkable what the female body can do!

I’ve never been so happy for so long. I just adore this little girl, being a mom, watching my husband light up to see our daughter and hearing her giggle as they play together.

Life is beautiful.

Tiger bum

I thought these posts about cloth deserved some pictures!

Here is Precious in a Fuzzibunz Elite one size pocket diapers that I bought new. It’s so soft and fun!

Diving into cloth diapering

After deciding that we would try cloth diapers and acquiring several different types, I had to figure out how to prep them. We had a pay per load shared laundry room in the basement and a Haier portable washer in our apartment for which we were waiting for a replacement part.

For brand new cloth prefolds, they recommend you wash them 5 or 6 times to wash away the natural oils and get the fibers to a more absorbent state. Paying for and doing that many loads of laundry in the shared room in the basement was unappealing, so I decided to try the boiling method of prepping the prefolds. I filled my largest put with water and heated of until boiling. I then added 3 diapers, put the lid on, and boiled them for 20 minutes. Afterwards I brought the hot diapers to the bathroom and hung them up to try on my nifty new hanging drying rack. The water was a bit yellow with the oils, so I dumped it and started again.

Meanwhile, I hand washed the one brand new all in one bumgenius free time diaper. It was a dark color and the package recommended washing separately at first.

Later in the day, after I’d finished boiling all 12 Osocozy bleached Indian cotton prefolds, I went down to the laundry room and the them in the washer with some soap nuts. I put it on heavy spill and extra rinse so they’d hey add much time as possible. I also put all of the pocket diapers and inserts and the all in one in another washer with their own little bag of soap nuts. Once those loads were done I threw them all in one dryer, added extra time, and let them tumble around in there. Later I stuffed each of the pocket diapers and I made room in my diaper drawer for this new stash. By the end of the day we were ready to go with our cloth diapers!

That night I put Precious in the all-in-one. The next morning I was eager to see how it had performed and was quite happy with the results! It was wet on the inside but had not leaked and she did not look pink. Great!

Over the next few days we did have some learning experiences. I put a prefold and a cover on her for one of her usual poop times, and it was my first time trying the “angelwings” fold with a Snappi diaper fastener. That was not a good idea! I had not put it on well and the poop got everywhere.

The other nights since then I have tried different pocket diaper set-ups. One night I forgot to add a second liner. There wasn’t enough absorbency and she soaked through the diaper. Another night I put two microfiber liners in, and they absorbed most of it but I hadn’t placed them so well inside their pocket and there was a part in the back that with just the pocket diaper and no liner and she leaked through that area. Two of the nights we used a brand of pocket diaper without an inner leg gusset and they have given her a bit of rash at the leg opening, which by the way has been more on her leg itself than at the hip area where you would expect it to fall. Last night I tried one microfiber and one cotton/hemp liner, but that leaked too. I’m going to try the all-in-one again tonight.

During the daytime though I am super happy with them and I think we just need to figure out the right night system for us. I have done the dirty diaper laundry once in the shared facilities and then once with the portable washing machine once the replacement part came. Doing the laundry with the machine and then hanging in our bathroom was super easy and with that system we should save around $50 to $75 a month over disposable diapers and wipes.

Her diaper rash does seem to be improved but it’s not gone yet. We’ll see what happens as we keep trying!

Deciding to switch to cloth diapering

Have you thought about making the switch to cloth diapers but hesitated for one reason or another? Up until recently, so did I. But after a bit of learning and prep, on Sunday I put my baby in her first cloth diaper. It’s been a few days and I’m pretty happy about it so far.

Having used cloth diapers at one of my nanny jobs several years ago, I seriously considered using cloth for my baby as I was planning for her arrival. I wanted to do what was best for my baby, for our bank account, and for the environment. At the same time, I didn’t want to take on more than I could handle. We live in a nyc apartment with a shared laundry facility in the basement, so the cost and effort involved in doing laundry is significant (though not as much as it was at our last apartment where the nearest laundromat was a couple flights of stairs and several blocks away).

I researched cloth diapers and ran the numbers, and found that at $4 per load to wash and dry our laundry, the cost savings of cloth would have been negligible. There might be a little savings after additional kids, but there would probably also be extra accessories and laundry cycles for prepping and stripping the diapers that I hadn’t accounted for, and in the end the cost difference would be on the order of $100, which didn’t seem enough to convince me to make the commitment to such regular laundry.

Meanwhile the various environmental analyses, when considering the energy and water involved in doing the laundry, didn’t come out as convincingly in favor of cloth as one might expect.

The third factor, diaper rash, was something we couldn’t assess until the baby was here.

So I registered for disposables, put several cloth diapers in my “baby idea list” on amazon, and didn’t think about it again for a while. The baby came and we used disposables and tried to get through those first few bleary-eyed months.

Whenever I met New Yorkers who were using cloth for their babies, I would ask them about their laundry set up. Most admitted they weren’t saving much money with it and that they did have quite a laundry routine.

But then one day I met someone who said she had installed a portable washer in her kitchen, so she wasn’t paying per load of laundry. Excitedly, I asked her to tell me more. It turns out she had a Haier portable washing machine which uses a regular outlet and connects to the kitchen sink. I’d never heard of such a thing but it seemed it might make cloth doable for us.

In my neighborhood of Washington Heights we have an active local parents listserve, so I kept an eye out for someone to post a used one. When someone finally did I snapped it up. We brought it home and I used it for a few weeks, trying to do both the baby and adult laundry with it. It works great, and is easy to use for the small baby items. I found however that with the load size and need to find space to hang dry, I couldn’t keep up with the adult laundry with it.

Meanwhile, my daughter got to a point where she was waking almost daily with some rash, despite generous applications of Aquaphor or Boudreau’s Butt Paste and regular treatment with Triple Paste. So, I toyed with the idea that it was time to try cloth.

I asked my husband what he thought, and he said it was a great idea. His mom had switched to cloth for him because of his sensitive skin, so he felt it would be natural to do the same for our baby.

I turned to the listserve again, posting a request for used cloth diapers, and acquired about a dozen pocket diapers, 20 inserts, and several all in one’s for only about $50. What a great deal! I also had put some prefolds and covers in our Amazon cart and when my husband needed to buy something else he went ahead and ordered them.

So about a week later I had all the supplies and was ready to get started. I’ll post soon about how I prepped and what I’ve learned in the first few days.

You know Motherhood is right for you when…

You hear that today your baby is very quick to upset and challenging and you wish you were home with her instead of her being with someone else

5 months!

My daughter is 5 months old today, and what a joy.

She is getting more mobile all the time. Now if you put her down on her back most of the time she will roll over to her tummy and happily play that way. She can turn around in a circle, though she is usually trying to move forward
when she ends up turning. She really wants to crawl! She can’t quite sit on her own yet, but she is getting close.

She holds toys in her hands and brings them to her mouth. She is captivated by books and will look at the pages while you read through whole board books, sometimes several times.

She loves it when you sing to her. She especially lights up for Old McDonald Had a Farm, and she is soothed by Hush Little Baby, the Alphabet Song, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

She naps for a few hours a day, often taking about 4 20 or 30 minute naps. A nap of 45 minutes or more is on the long side for her these days. She goes to bed between 7 and 9, most often around 8:30, unswaddled but in the baby merlin magic sleep suit.

Sometimes I put her to bed and stay up for a bit, and other times I just lay there with her and go to sleep myself. She wakes up several times through the night and we usually get up for the day around 7:30 am.  She sleeps next to me in the bed and I love the closeness, the ease of nursing, and being able to feel her little body and cuddle her if she is upset.

She really loves to go outside and to be worn in a wrap on me. She smiles just to see me take out the wraps and is usually happy for a long time when I wear her.

She loves to look at herself in the mirror and to look at hands, whether they are hers or someone else’s.

She loves her daddy too and laughs when he plays with her. When he greets her in the morning while she lays in bed next to me she grins widely and looks for him when he leaves the room.

Being her mother is the most wonderful, amazing experience and I am so thankful to share this time with her and watch her grow!