Chewin’ the Fat with Dr. Eats

I met with a nutritionist yesterday to talk strategy for Ceeya's feeding issues. It was very helpful, and I walked out of there feeling poorer, but optimistic.   For one thing, the nutritionist (known henceforth here as "Dr. Eats") was very encouraging about what we are doing right, such as all eating together as a family at the table without the TV on, saying grace before meals (SPD kids need routine and ritual), and pushing fresh as opposed to processed foods as much as possible. She also liked that we are doing sensory activities that are related to food, such as putting uncooked rice and beans in a large Tupperware container, hiding small toys in the rice and having Celia dig through to find them, and "painting" with whipped cream.   Her primary concern as we talked about what Ceeya eats is that she's barely getting any carbs, since she doesn't eat rice, pasta, bread or potatoes (except in French fry form). So she wants us to begin trying to get her to eat those at every meal—to keep giving her the core foods she loves but also at each meal to offer a food she won't currently eat, preferably a starch. She made the point that when Ceeya rejects a food that she has been accustomed to eating, we should respect that, keep it out of her diet for a few days and then bring it back.   Interesting: when I told her of Ceeya's vestibular issues (i.e. she becomes anxious with unsteady or unpredictable movement), she asked whether she sits in a high chair. She does, so Dr. Eats suggested simply moving her to a child-sized table and chair, so her feet are firmly on the ground and she doesn't feel like she is floating in space. Despite the high chair having a platform for her feet to rest on, she may simply have issues with eating that far up off the ground. That had not even occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense.   Other tips: make everything bite-sized and stick a toothpick in it. Since Ceeya hates touching things, she may be more amenable to eating food when holding it on a stick. (She certainly loves popsicles, so this is familiar to her.) Dr. Eats suggested making really tiny meatballs, cream of wheat "snowballs," and rice balls to be speared with toothpicks. Sweet Dub, ever the dedicated father, has declared Friday night "Toothpick Night," and claims he is making food the whole family can eat and it will all be on toothpicks.   Dr. Eats says we should make the most of Ceeya's willingness to dip things to get more protein into her—since she loves tortilla chips, she suggested pureeing black or pinto beans into bean dip, or making "baby" guacamole with mashed avocado and a little salt. She is already into dipping fruit into yogurt, so we will just continue with that.   Portion size is another thing. We don't tend to give Ceeya a lot of food at one time, because it overwhelms her and she will just throw it all off her high chair tray and look at us blankly. Dr. Eats said that even giving her a lump of mac and cheese is too much—we basically have to differentiate each noodle. "Pull out five individual noodles from the mac and cheese," she said. (Dear Lord.) Dr. Eats also suggested getting Ceeya more involved with food prep—for example, in making homemade chicken tenders. She advised putting cornflakes in a Ziploc bag and letting Ceeya bang on the bag until they're pulverized, then putting boneless chicken pieces in the bag and letting her shake it until they're coated. She can then watch me fry them. "Now, she may not eat them the first few times," she said. "In fact, you might have to make them that way twenty different times before she'll actually eat them. I'm not saying she's going to eat a new food tomorrow, but she may eat it in three months."   So, pretty much as expected, there is no quick fix. We're in this for the long haul, but there is at least light at the end of the tunnel.   And my little lambie pie is so worth it.

The Official Word

Yesterday when I picked Ceeya up at daycare, they told me she not only refused to eat her yogurt, but she had a complete meltdown about it. It feels like the range of foods she will eat is steadily shrinking.

Here’s the good news: I have a consultation with a nutritionist tomorrow. Cost: $175. That’s not so good.

But: we received our full evaluation from the occupational therapist. Verdict: Ceeya presents with an array of behaviors that indicate sensory processing difficulties, including:

Tactile defensiveness, which means her central nervous system has difficulty processing and modulating incoming touch sensations. She is averse to many textures including many different kinds of food. This has impacted her muscle development in her hands because she does not use them as effectively as she needs to manipulate and explore, so she is delayed in terms of grasp patterns and object manipulation.

Oral defensiveness, which makes her highly sensitive to tastes, textures and temperatures of food. She eats a very limited range of foods, primarily cheese, fruit, crackers, chips, and over time has actually decreased the foods she will eat, probably because she is bored from eating the same damn thing all the damn time. So now off the list are cottage cheese, yogurt (as of yesterday), applesauce, steamed green beans, broccoli and peas.

Poor modulation, which means she can’t self-regulate very well. She gets upset easily and can’t calm down, she has a hard time falling asleep, she is a restless sleeper and if she wakes up in the middle of the night she can’t put herself back to sleep. I am serious when I tell you that I have not had a good night’s sleep in over two years.

Over-responsiveness to sound, i.e. “kids’ birthday parties are my worst nightmare.”

Decreased vestibular processing, which means her awareness of where her body is in space is poor and unpredictable movement of her body freaks her out. This translates into her hatred of swings, not liking to tip her head back to get her hair washed, and an aversion to unsteady surfaces like a balance bridge or a large trampoline (she seemed to like the small trampoline at the OT center, which had a support bar she could hold with both hands while jumping).

So we clearly have some work to do. I am relieved that this is not just my imagination, or something she will grow out of on her own. I was really upset when I first read the report, mainly because of her fine motor delays, which I wasn’t even aware of. She has low muscle tone and decreased strength in her hands due to her tactile sensitivity. Rationally I know this is reversible, but it just hurt my heart to read it.

Recommendation: occupational therapy twice per week, as expected.

Current status: waiting for a phone call back from the head of the OT Center to discuss more realistic options.

A Grain of Salt

This week I have been going back and forth via email with the very nice occupational therapist who is writing up Ceeya’s assessment. She cautioned me that because SPD is not recognized as an official condition and will not be until inclusion in the DSM-V in 2013, for now she is going to have to couch her observations very carefully in order to see if we can get full coverage for Ceeya’s therapy. For one thing, she is going to note things that I don’t think are an issue, like Ceeya not being able to put a wooden puzzle together correctly, as a fine motor skills delay. “Read it with a grain of salt,” she says. (I love salt! Salt N Pepa too!)

On the one hand, I appreciate this, as I do not have the fundage to pay for occupational therapy twice a week out of pocket, to the tune of $15,000+ per year (since that was her initial recommendation—a full year of therapy, sweet holy Moses. Have I mentioned that my darling husband got laid off in April and is still unemployed?). On the other hand, I’m not crazy about the idea of Ceeya being labeled with something she doesn’t have, and I worry about all sorts of “pre-existing condition” crap that might follow her forever. That does not float my boat, my friends.

If Ceeya did have some sort of fine motor skills problem, it goes without saying that I would want her to get some help for it. I am not THAT bad of a mommy. I think. But that morning was the first time, to my knowledge, that she had ever even seen a puzzle of that sort. The fact that she matched the shapes to where they were supposed to be, but didn’t actually press them in hard enough so they would stay there, indicates to me she didn’t fully understand the point of the exercise—not that she was incapable of doing it correctly.

Over the weekend, I bought a similar puzzle at Target which had more pieces and was labeled ages 3 and up (they didn’t have any which were labeled for younger kids, which is probably why Ceeya hasn’t encountered them before since she is not even 2 yet). Ceeya matched all the pieces perfectly but again didn’t push them fully into place. When I asked her to do that, she did, with a bit of frustration on a couple of oddly shaped pieces, but she figured out that she just had to move the pieces around a bit to make them fit. Now it is one of her favorite things to do.

This leads me to the official Blah Blah plan for handling our business, which boils down to this: we would rather fork out a few hundred dollars at the outset for sensory-stimulating and educational toys and play with Ceeya every day ourselves than pay out $1,200 a month to a twice-weekly occupational therapist and then fight to get reimbursed by the insurance company.

By this I mean no disrespect to occupational therapy as a profession. I realize neither Sweet Dub nor I are trained to provide OT, but surely there are ways we can work with the OT to reduce the time and cost and make it work for our family.

Stay tuned for next time, when we (hopefully) get the actual written report. What will it say? What does it all mean? Will I ever look at a wooden shape-sorting puzzle the same way? And will there be ice cream? (Highly doubtful, and perplexing.)

And So Our Long Journey Began...

So we had Ceeya’s assessment on Saturday morning, and it was quite an experience. The Blah Blah Family arrived at the center on time, and sat in a very nicely furnished, sunny waiting area with lots of toys, books and puzzles. Ceeya and Viva immediately began playing together with one of those giant wooden activity boxes. Our assessing occupational therapist arrived and started us off with the paperwork. There was so much paperwork that Sweet Dub and I split it and continued working on it throughout the session. Much of it involved our own assessments of Ceeya’s sensitivities, but some of it involved very detailed questions about her birth and her developmental milestones. I honestly don’t remember exactly when she started doing certain things (the curse of the second child!) but I know that she has always been well within the normal range of physical development.

Anyhoo, we were there for well over an hour, and the OT tested her with puzzles, checked her muscle tone, tried to get her into a swing (which Ceeya was simply not having—she detests swings and almost anything that makes her unsteady. Oddly, she enjoys a rocking horse or a rocking chair), watched her on a trampoline, checked her balance on an exercise ball, watched her eat, had her use crayons and utensils, etc.

One thing I will say is that I was really surprised and proud that Ceeya pretty much took off exploring in each play room that we went to. (There were three successively bigger rooms.) This might have been because Viva was there with her and there were no other kids around, but still, I was pleased to see that.

We have not yet received the official evaluation, but the bottom line is this: the OT is not sure that Ceeya has enough “wrong” with her to be eligible for her sessions to be covered by insurance, and yet (yes, you knew this was coming) she would recommend therapy twice a week for the next year. She's pretty sure she has SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder), and that she's pretty much constantly in a state of "fight or flight," but yeah, probably our insurance won't cover it. Occupational therapy costs $150/session. Doing the math: that’s $1,200 a month.

Fortunately, I work for a children's social services agency and my bullshit meter was pinging off the charts.

Stay tuned for the next installment, when we take matters into our own hands.

Floundering

Recently, I received confirmation that, much as I’ve suspected, Ceeya has a sensory processing disorder. We have a variety of problematic issues that have gotten progressively worse in recent months. I don’t talk much about that here, which is a shame, because it might help someone else who is struggling with something similar. But I feel that we are just getting started sorting out her issues and receiving treatment (primarily occupational therapy). It may be a long slog.

I’m teetering on the fence of how much do I share here. How much of this is really her story, but also about how this is such a small part of who she is. She is a sweet and smart and funny (yes, she already has a sense of humor) kid. I love her to pieces. I don’t want this condition to define her, but at the same time it occupies so much of my energy and brain space.

Too often these days, the things that are happening in my life are personal to many other people, and I don’t feel comfortable sharing so much about their lives. Again, rethinking what I want this blog to be.

Thanks for your patience as I sort this out.

Working from Home

Sometimes when you are working from home all the planets align and even though you might occasionally stop working to throw in a load of laundry, you nonetheless are able to buckle down without the distractions of the "water cooler talk" and the like and you write something totally kick ass and you can actually check off a huge project on your TO DO list, a project which has been hanging like a millstone around your neck, like a big frickin' piece of granite or even a giant block of ice, whatever, it's heavy, dude.

Or sometimes, like today, you decide you will buckle down to work right after you make a big pot of coffee. But when you happily pull out the bag, it is suspiciously light, and you realize in horror you are almost out of coffee. And then you go searching through your freezer in hopes that a random bag of java might have fallen behind some tater tots (which you just mis-typed as tater tits, which is a bizarre notion in itself). And no, no hidden coffee, but then you notice that a bag of edamame beans was not correctly closed, and so there are assorted beans littering the bottom of your freezer, along with assorted coffee grounds. And of course you notice there are things in the freezer that are well past their prime, like pot roast that has been frozen for well over six months, so you go on a veritable freezer purge and a good scrubbing, and then you realize that you have just spent half an hour when you should be working, cleaning out the freezer. And the coffee still isn’t made.

And then you think this would be a funny blog post about procrastination, but then you think you don’t have time to blog, you have a grant to write, and then you promise yourself that if you buckle down and finish it, you’ll write the blog post too. And then you make the coffee and go out to the backyard and write out in the sunshine for 15 minutes so you get some Vitamin D and then you go back inside and type for 3 hours and finish the first draft of the grant and email it off and then boy howdy you feel pretty good about that, so here we are.

Happy weekend to you all, procrastinators and non.

Cuatrodos

Hello!

I am forty-two years old today.

That is not so bad, right? It is better than the alternative, which is to cease to exist altogether. When you put it like that, it sounds pretty damn good to me.

Over the weekend, we were having some lovely, funky friends over, and I bought an assortment of beers because I was feeing a bit whimsical. Why not try different kinds of summer ales and such?, I thought. They might in fact have enjoyed some rum punch or something, but making some sort of rum punch was a bit beyond me. (They probably like punch. I knew I should have made punch.) At any rate, the cashier carded me. I almost wept, except that I was giggling a little bit. I thanked her and as I handed over my driver’s license as proof that I was of legal drinking age, I said, “I will be 42 next week!” I might have sobbed as I said it. Maybe not.

So here we are, forty-two. It honestly is not all that different from 41, or 40, or even 39, if you want to know the truth, and yes, I can remember that far back. The main issue of being 42, and it may not be related to my age, seems to be that I think I am going blind in one eye. My ophthalmologist can not seem to tweak my prescription correctly in my right eye, and so I spend my days tapping away at my computer with one eye closed in order to see correctly. Since I spend a great deal of time writing for my job, this is annoying. If I open my eye, it’s all blurry and I can’t read a thing. Not to worry, though, I can drive perfectly well! Take it easy out there, Greater Los Angeles!

Today I am looking forward to having Ceeya sing Happy Birthday to me on my actual birthday. She has been practicing the song every day for about three weeks or so. It sounds a bit different when she sings it, principally because she interprets it as “Appo DIRTday to you,” which I love, and I particularly love the way it sounds in the high-pitched gusto with which she sings it.

One final thing: In honor of my Dirt Day, and with a hat tip to Chad Ochocinco, I am changing my name for the day to Lisa Cuatrodos. Encantado.

Pampering Myself (and not with Diapers)

I took a few days off a couple of weeks ago (calling it a vacation seems a bit disingenuous, since we didn’t go anywhere and since I spent most of it working hard corralling the kids without the help of my husband). On one of the days when Viva was in camp and Ceeya was at daycare, I took 3.5 hours at a new salon to get my hair colored. Call me shallow, vain, whatever, but baby, I felt like a new woman when I walked out of there. My new colorist, April, was sweet and down to earth and my hair looks exactly its natural color. I mean exactly.

My hair is very thick and resistant to color, so whenever I color it takes forever. Somehow she managed to cover most of the silver hairs that were cropping up (I did find a few strays here and there later) and she also managed to duplicate not only my natural light brown hair but also the lighter highlights that naturally occur. I’m not sure exactly what went down in the salon—I may have made promises I couldn’t keep, something about free tickets to the Cayman Islands or something, it’s all a bit foggy in my memory, but you know, whatever I said, she hooked me up and my hair looks better than it has in recent memory.

I was thinking, as I walked out, how difficult it is for me to do this kind of thing with any regularity, but how easily it made me feel better about myself. And feeling better about myself makes me better in every other aspect of my life (cue cheesy music here, I mean could I BE more predictable). Sorry for the cliché, but for reals, it’s one small thing that makes a big difference.

Take care of yourselves out there. Give pampering a chance!

Blog Angst

Much has been happening in my personal life and I don’t feel I can share much of it here, although when I sit down to write, that’s all that’s on my mind. Then there’s the larger question: what is the purpose of me writing here? What or who is it for?

When I began blogging many years ago, I did so at the suggestion of some friends (Splooey and Mr. X, and they know who they are). “Blog? What’s a blog?” I said. They knew of my writerly ambitions and thought it would be a good way for me to get started writing regularly, with no pressure. Maybe they thought I would find my voice.

I like to write, and I like to make people laugh. I think I thought blogging might help me write some humorous essays, a la David Sedaris or something. Maybe. But all I know is I’m not feeling very funny these days, and I’m wondering if it’s because writing is an introspective exercise and when I take a half-second to get introspective, I get depressed.

But when there are these significant lapses between posts, a year later I look back and wonder what happened. Hence, I’m writing this so I can document where I am.

I am exhausted in just about every aspect of my being—physically (we just recovered from a family-wide bout with a nasty stomach virus), mentally, emotionally, the end. I no longer enjoy my work. I still enjoy my kids (most of the time). I miss Sweet Dub because he is in the middle of a manic creative phase right now, trying to launch a new career and get a TV project off the ground. My extended family is a huge mess and I’m trying to stay out of it. Work is really making me unhappy and I feel I have no options for fixing it.

It’s just a rough time.

Follow-up to this post: due to liability issues, one can’t actually tell this prospective employee that she needs to do something about her hair. Total can of worms, and what a shame. She was the top candidate for this job but eliminated from consideration for this one reason. (See the comments section for more info if you'd like.)

Can This Be Salvaged?

Something has been weighing on my mind over the past week or so. I know of a situation in which there is a job opening and three candidates have been interviewed. Of the three, one clearly ranked above the rest in terms of experience and consensus was that this person was the most personable and all-around best fit for the position. The position was not offered to this person because of this person’s appearance. This person would be going out to meet with people to get them involved with the organization and it was unanimously felt that this person’s appearance (more specifically, hair) was unkempt and disheveled and that this person would not present well to the public for this reason. This person is warm, well-spoken, and passionate about the cause that they would be speaking about. Everyone who interviewed this person liked this person and wanted to hire this person. Everyone on the interview panel agreed that it was a shame they had to discount the person for this reason.

In this economic climate, I can’t imagine that this person (who, like the other two candidates, has been unemployed for some months) would refuse to do something about their hair if they really wanted the job. This is probably hindering their job search considerably, so even if they are offended that this criticism is made, it just seems the decent thing to do to let this person know what’s up.

The person who ultimately makes the hiring decision has been agonizing over this for the past week, particularly given that another interview was held yesterday and the interviewee was not anywhere near the caliber of the first person. The interview panel now compares every interviewee to the first person and finds them lacking.

The hiring person really wants the first candidate. If you were in the position of the hiring decider (just made that up) how would you handle this situation? If you were the really strong candidate who is being passed over due to your appearance, would you want to be told? And how?

Beach Blanket Blah

Happy 6th of July. It’s chilly and raining here in Los Angeles. Maybe I should move to San Francisco?

Speaking of chilly, now that T-ball season is over, our Saturday mornings are free [That I even mention this tells you how enamored I am of organized sports and getting up and running out the door first thing on the first day of my weekend] and this Saturday, we decided to go to the beach. Some of us wore bathing suits with shorts and sweatshirts over them, while some of us decided why even pretend that we were going to get into the frigid and filthy Pacific. It was overcast, and “June gloom” (a weather phenomenon wherein Southern Californians wake to a morning cloud layer overhead which usually gives way to sunshine later in the day) has not been burning off until sometimes mid-afternoon, so we bundled up, threw all our crap into a wagon, threw the wagon into the back of the Jeep, and motored over to Santa Monica.

We arrived at the beach maybe twenty minutes later, removed the children and wagon from the vehicle, and trundled across the sand, where we staked out our spot. Let it be known here that the Blah Blahs are spoiled beach-goers, in that we generally go to the beach for only a couple of hours because we live close enough that it does not need to be an all-day affair. Also, we do not like crowds, so we like to get to the beach early, do our beachy activities, and then move on as the crowds start to arrive.

We laid out our blanket and promptly began building sand castles (Viva) and eating snacks (me) and placing teaspoons of sand into buckets (Ceeya*). We Blah Blahs are industrious folks. Sweet Dub sat in a beach chair and over the next twenty minutes or so, provided the following commentary:

Man, I wish I had a breakfast burrito right now.

Is anyone else hungry?

Man, it’s cold. I mean, it’s freezing!

Did you see that? Are those dolphins?

I’m wearing two T-shirts and I’m still cold. My feet are even cold. Are yours?

Man, it’s cold. This is really unpleasant. We might have to go home, guys.

So…I’m thinking we head out of here and go find a breakfast burrito. Anyone?

Honey, where was that place we used to go to that had those really good burritos?

Why are you laughing?

This is unpleasant.

Shortly after this we were treated to a gross display of extremely poor beach etiquette in which a family of five who were clearly from out of state arrived for their first look at the Pacific Ocean and despite there being very few people at the beach plonked their stuff down about two feet away from the people closest to us and then proceeded to yell back and forth to each other at great volume, from the water’s edge to the blanket to the teenage daughter who was hanging back near the car, a good half a football field away, draped in a blanket against the wind and the water spray.

Oh, dear Lord. I was fascinated yet simultaneously annoyed. I began to ruminate on the wisdom of posting some pointers at the beach, to wit:

First and foremost, most people go to the beach to relax and have fun. As much as possible, give your beach neighbors some space. This is easier when the beach is not crowded, but even when it is, keep at least 6 feet (i.e. one beach-blanket length) between yourself and the next group of people. We don’t want to know all your business, we don’t want to lie all on top of you, and we want some illusion of privacy.

If you’re going to play football or Frisbee, don’t do it right in the field of play. That is, don’t do it right at the shoreline, where people are entering and exiting the water and where people often like to take a walk. Sorry, but that’s unfair. Do it in the beach space behind where people are relaxing, i.e., furthest from the water.

Also, and this is related, don’t yell into your cell phone. Don’t blast your music. And for heaven’s sake, don’t set up your beach blanket and umbrella directly in front of someone who’s already sitting there. It’s rude. Finally, don’t smoke and don’t leave trash on the beach.

Whew, I feel better.

It's all a blur, but I think we lasted a full hour at the beach due to the cold and wind, rude beach neighbors, and lack of breakfast burritos materializing out of thin air. However, as I remember it, we nonetheless had a very nice afternoon chilling out in the backyard after the sun came out. I even seem to remember Sweet Dub later making a very scrumptious surf and turf dinner, so all was not lost.


* This is how our youngest says her own name. Since that is how Viva got her bloggy nickname, I am holding with tradition and will henceforth on this blog refer to Miss Celie as she refers to herself.

Wistfully, Summer

Today I do not like being The Grown Up.

Today is the first day of summer camp for my little schnitzel with noodles, the All-Wonderful Viva.

Her father, the Ever-Amazing Sweet Dub, was a little concerned, I mean, curious, about how her day was going, and since he is not working, he thought he would sneak a peek a few hours in to see how she was doing.

Here is his report:

“I can see her right now, it looks like they’re just finishing lunch. She can barely sit still. She just jumped up and ran over to the counselor and I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she looks like she is really excited. She’s kind of standing on one leg and leaping around while she’s talking. Okay, he said yes to whatever she was asking and she ran back inside the gym all happy. So it looks like things are going well. You know, I can’t hear her but I know my baby. I can read her body language and it seems like she is pretty excited, so – oh, here she comes. She is sitting back down at the picnic table and it looks like she is doing some kind of art project.”

I wish I was doing some kind of art project. I wouldn’t mind an art project and maybe some kind of group game that involved kicking a ball and running and then having a cold beverage and a snack.

I loved camp. I loved the swimming, and the macrame, and making those plasticy lanyards, and playing soccer, and eating PB&J on the grass. And the smell of the grass, and the heat, and the sweatiness, and flinging oneself from activity to activity with total encompassing joy.

It’s hard being The Grown Up some days, is all.

First Post by Viva

From Sweet Dub's iPhone, written on Memorial Day weekend:

I just went to the beach with my daddy and mommy I had a great time with my family we dug a tunnel we almost hit water my little sister is scared of the sand and dosnt want to put her shoes on I wanted to swing on the swings but my dad didn't let me so we had to leave good bye.

It makes me a little breathless, reading it, because there's no punctuation, but that is part of the beauty of it.

Find a Happy Place

Sweet Dub is going out of town for a few days to do some filming. I miss him already. I really do! I have a lump in my throat and it’s been about 6 hours. That’s kind of ridic, but as Woody Allen once said in far ickier circumstances, “The heart wants what it wants.”

In the meantime, I will be working on Celie’s food aversion and social anxiety*, corralling kids before and after T-ball (it’s Team Picture Day on Saturday! At which time we will be asked to cough up an obscene amount of money to get a picture of our kid with her team and her very own personalized baseball trading cards with her picture on them! Remind me again why we are doing team sports?**), attending two Sunday birthday parties which are being held at exactly the same time, and trying to meet multiple deadlines at work. It is time to put away childish things like coffee and invest in some Red Bull. Or maybe just step it up to espresso, no?

Work is kind of sucking right now. The deadlines seem to be reproducing and as they do my Malaise seems to be trying to keep up, followed closely by Eye Strain and Headaches, both of which seem to appear within an hour of my arrival at work. I have not had a vacation this year (woe is me), and I am not expecting to get one now until September. Feeling very ground down and unappreciated, whiny whiny fiddlesticks.

P.S. I have officially hit the wall on the third of eight projects I am working on. Well, I cleared my desk of two projects this morning, so I am actually ahead of schedule. When does THAT ever happen, I ask you?

P.P.S. Bizarre interaction of the day: an older white male co-worker telling me, “You da bomb!” What?! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

* I expect to have both of these completely under control by the time her dad gets back on Sunday. I believe this falls under the category of “if you can believe it, you can achieve it.” In reality, I am hopeful that I can get her to accept one new food this weekend. Baby steps, as They say.

(Have been doing some research on food aversion and have discovered that Celia has what is called food neophobia, i.e., a fear of any new foods. [This flabbergasts me, since I am pretty much game to eat anything and that was the expectation in my family of origin, in which my sister and I gained reputations as “picky eaters” because she would not eat lima beans and I would not eat raisins. Honestly. We would both eat all kinds of things that other kids wouldn’t eat, including Brussels sprouts and beets, and yet we were stigmatized. My family is a piece of work.] This goes beyond being a picky eater into total freakout territory. Whee, fun times.)

** I am so not a joiner of anything. Slacker, thy name is Lisa.

The Dangers of Cloning

If you were a fly on the wall, yesterday evening you would have seen Sweet Dub embrace me in the kitchen, after which the following exchange took place:

Sweet Dub: I love you so much, I wish there were three of you.

Mama B: What would you do with three of me?

Sweet Dub [clearly he has a plan]: One would stay home and take care of the kids. One would have a high-powered job to keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed. And one would be devoted solely to me.

Mama B: I see where you’re going with this. So that last one wouldn’t have to do all that much except work out, take care of your…bedroom needs, and go shopping?

Sweet Dub: Shopping?! Shopping for what?

Mama B [thinking "arm candy"]: Lingerie, and clothes—

Sweet Dub: Why would she need clothes?

Why, indeed.

Kinky

Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.
- Hubert de Givenchy, Vogue, July 1985

I think I need a haircut.

My hair is getting really long and I’m tending again toward my cop-out hairdo of pulling my wet hair into a simple ponytail and letting it air dry on my way to work (which it doesn’t, because I have really thick hair). As Viva says, “That is not a hairstyle, Mom.”

What a journey my hair has been over the years. I know that many women agonize over their hair, but the journey seems particularly fraught for those of us with super-hyper curly hair—and those of us whose ancestry has at least some passing acquaintance with Africa get the double whammy of having hair that is simply not a part of the mainstream standard of beauty.

My guilty pleasure (well, one of them) is watching What Not to Wear. But after watching it for a while (and honestly I watch it much less than I used to—I watched it every morning when I was on medical leave a couple of years ago), the segment where they would do the hair makeover started to bug me, because invariably whenever they came across someone with curly or even wavy hair, they would blow it straight. “Sleek and sophisticated,” they would gush.

I call bullshit on that. You mean you are going to teach someone how to completely change their wardrobe to look better and feel better about themselves, but you are going to tell them that the way their hair looks growing naturally out of their heads is not okay? It’s perplexing, because so often hosts Stacy and Clinton preach the message of fit: know your body, accept the shape you have, and dress to compliment your unique shape. They never say you have to lose 50 pounds, or your legs are too short, or your shoulders are too broad. They’re all about working with what you have. And then the hair stylist comes in and gives the woman straight hair. I say: teach them how to style their curls! Teach them to love their hair as it is!

I digress, but only because it is related to my personal hair mantra, which is: It’s all about self-acceptance. And again, working with what you have. When I was a kid, my mom got so frustrated with trying to braid my hair that when I was about 9, she finally just cut it all off—without even asking me first. I then got mistaken for a boy all the time for a couple of years there, because she kept cutting it. This actually was fine with me most of the time because I was a total tomboy, climbing trees and playing Six Million Dollar Man, and I wouldn’t wear a dress if you paid me.

When I hit middle school, my hair had grown out enough that I went back to having a wet set (ecch, can you imagine) every Sunday. By high school, curling irons were it. My hair might not be straight, but at least it was in smooth, big curls. Near the tail end of high school, I cut it all off very short and wore my hair natural in a light brown/dark blonde afro and since it was the 80s, with very thick blue eyeliner. Oh, my.

By the time I hit college, I’d discovered relaxers. No one in my family ever used them, so I had no personal experience with them. I never thought they would work on my hair, but at some point a friend suggested I use one to texturize my hair, so it would still be curly, but grow down, not out. I used them with some success throughout my 20s. During this time, people would tell me how gorgeous my hair was. Are you kidding? Never in my life had I ever thought my hair was pretty. And here I was, with this giant curly head of hair, learning how to use leave-in conditioners and actually enjoying how my hair looked, floating halfway down my back.

By the time I hit 30, I was very happy with my hair and stopped relaxing it. I also became something of a hair product junkie and began falling in love with sites like nappturality and naturallycurly.com. One day, I was walking down Robertson Blvd. in Beverly Hills and a man in a convertible flagged me down. He complimented me on my hair and in the same breath said he was looking for models to be on a show about a Japanese hair straightening system. Would I be interested?

“How long does it last?” I asked.

“About six months,” he said.

“Even when you wet it?” I said.

“Yeah, you won’t believe it,” he enthused.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m all about the self-acceptance.” And I kept walking.

All about the self-acceptance…except, it seems now, when it comes to white hair.* Get me to a colorist, stat!

Apparently I’ve still got some work to do.

* I’m not going gray, I’m going white. I think it’ll look cool when I’m 50, but I’m not there yet.

Changing the Paradiggum

There was this commercial several years ago in which a bunch of people are sitting around in a conference room and one guy is all gung-ho and trying to get everyone else on board and he says “Sometimes you have to change the paradigm [which he pronounces paradiggum]...think outside the box.” And that has become part of the Blah Blah family lexicon, that “changing the paradiggum.”

And yet fixing one problem sometimes creates another.

Case in point: Miss Celie has been having sleep issues for some time. A (not so) brief history:

Stage One: We started out as co-sleepers. This was very sweet when she was an infant. I would just scoop her next to me and we would sleep with our heads close together all night long. I set up the Co-Sleeper next to the bed, more as a bed rail than anything since she didn’t actually sleep in it, and I slept in between Celie and Sweet Dub. This worked just fine until…

Stage Two: At some point she learned to roll over and keeping her on the side of the bed, even with the Co-Sleeper, wasn’t working. Sweet Dub was no longer worried about rolling over onto her and squishing her in the middle of the night, so we would then go to sleep with her between us. This worked for a very short time, because:

Stage Three: She began crawling and then walking, and would practice in her sleep, flopping around and kicking Sweet Dub in the head. He would wake up, irate, and stomp to the couch and sleep there for the rest of the night, while I would sleep like a rock, oblivious. Not very fair to him, and yet because she was still waking up to eat in the middle of the night, I was too tired to do all that much about it. However, eventually we moved on to…

Stage Four: We’d put her into her crib in the room she shared with Viva at the beginning of the night. At some point she would wake up, I would feed her and/or change her, and because she is a high-need baby (read: loud), I would have to remove her from the room so as to allow Viva to get some sleep. At that point I was so drunk with sleep deprivation that I would stumble to the couch and lie down with her there or just take her back to bed with me. In the latter case, within 30 minutes or so Sweet Dub would get kicked in the face, exit the room and go back to the couch. And I would continually wake up because I was getting kicked and banged into by my very active sleeper. All was not well in Blahville.

Stage Five: Last week, we committed to sleep training Celie and moved Viva across the house into her own room. Bought a rocking chair and hunkered down to battle. The first two nights were rough. She woke up every couple of hours howling. But then…the heavens parted and the sun shone down and she began sleeping through the night. Regularly. For the first time in her nearly 19 months of life.

And now, we are paying the price. She is furious with me. She follows me around screaming at me. She cries, she throws things, she hits. I was reading a pamphlet yesterday for something I’m writing for work and I came across a list of typical behaviors for young kids who have experienced trauma (I am not making this up):

Difficulty sleeping
Excessive tantrums
Defiant, won’t cooperate
Difficulty staying still
Aggression or acting out
Depression or anxiety
Low self-esteem
Inability to trust others
Separation anxiety
Cries a lot and won’t be easily consoled

I could put a check mark next to almost every single one of these. And last night I had to go to an event after work and didn’t get home until after she went to bed. This morning she was a mess, falling apart every five minutes and screaming when I put her in her car seat. At day care, she was fine sitting on my lap on the floor as I talked with her caregiver. I asked if she had been acting out at all. No, she is as she has always been at day care – she’s one of the easy ones, they wish they had 15 kids like her. And then when I got up to leave, Celie fell to pieces. She clung to me screaming. All of the teachers looked shocked. “I’ve never seen her like this,” said her beloved E, who has been her primary caregiver from the beginning. She had to pry her away from me and walk outside with her to wave goodbye. It was not a good way to start my day, to put it mildly.

So I get it: Celie misses her mommy. A lot. And it makes her angry and sad. We have been very much on the go these days, even on weekends, what with T-ball games and birthday parties and going up to visit my ailing grandmother. Celie’s not getting a whole lot of one on one time, and now she’s not even sleeping with me. Where we used to wake up all snuggled against one another and she would pat my face and give me kisses, now she wakes up alone. One of us goes to get her and cuddle her immediately, but it’s still a loss.

And now I have written this epic post, is there a resolution? Sleep issues solved, separation issues drastically heightened. There are no easy answers except take some time off and be with her. This, during a busy season at work when my husband has just been laid off. I need my job. But my baby needs her mama.

For the record: I know I am a good mom. I know I am doing the best I can on this hamster wheel of modern life. Today I am buying a lottery ticket and hoping for the best. Maybe I could stay home with her for a while.

P.S. She is very sweet when she's not mad at me:

Blog Neglect

Blog neglect, n. That state of inactivity on one’s blog that makes all regular readers forget that one ever even had a blog. Also, the related malaise that leads to complete inarticulateness when one actually does sit down to write a post

Here is what I must do:
Set a regular schedule and stick to it. I’m aiming to blog Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

And…I got pulled away from this while writing and almost forgot to post it. Ah, the irony.

Good Times

Yesterday Sweet Dub and I met for lunch and inadvertently celebrated an anniversary: it’s been a month already since he got laid off.

I know! Doesn’t life always fast forward at the worst times?

At any rate, it was kind of a fun lunch. Laid-back, and Sweet Dub was dressed all casual and hip, wearing a new hat which makes him look even more like his doppelganger, Mos Def.

(Hm. Inserted a picture here of Mos Def in hat. Blogger will not recognize. What the fizzle?)

We talked about current events and other things not related to the kids. We ate Italian food and shared coffee afterward. It was kind of like being on a date.

We are working on a couple of creative projects together—well, mainly he is working on them, and I am trying to do my part in my spare time, and telling him whether I think this or that is a good idea, and helping with logistics when I can. And in this way, I think, the lay-off has been a good thing.

He is simultaneously happier, and a little stressed out, and excited. It’s an interesting, unpredictable chapter in this life we are building together.

That said, more to come…

Too Many Cooks

It is never simple here.
Everybody has an opinion.
A brief piece which is time sensitive is held up.
Repeatedly.
Because so-and-so has to review.
And then whats-their-face needs to read it.
Please say This and not That.
Take This out.
We can’t say That.
I find out that This is also politically sensitive.
In the sense that if we say This, we might not get That.
This could cause big problems for us.
Did he say you could say That?
I am tired and cranky and sick of this game.
Write it yourself then, I think.

It is just this moment.
Tomorrow or even an hour from now I will feel differently.
Inhale, exhale.
I go play with the kittens that were rescued from inside the wall while a crew was renovating an office.
They are tiny, and wide-eyed, and full of beans.
How can you not smile when watching them?
I defy you.

There’s Nothing I Hate More Than Nothing*

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!
- Richard Bach

When I first read this quotation I misunderstood that second part. I thought it meant, “There is no such thing as the worst thing that could happen to us.” Maybe it was because I hadn’t had my coffee yet.

But what he’s saying is that the worst thing that can happen to us is that nothing happens to us. And that, yes—that I agree with. How are you to grow as a person if nothing happens to you? Think of how much all your varied life experiences have shaped you--whether for good or bad. They are what make you so distinctly yourself.

Similar wisdom from another and very different source:

Just because it's different, doesn't mean it's scary...try new things!
-I'm From Barcelona, on the Yo Gabba Gabba! Music is Awesome CD

* Showing my age! Can you guess where the line comes from?

Acceptance

Just a quickie:

Catching up on my blog feed reading, and I came across this little gem which had me nodding my head. In it, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits reiterates what has been floating through my mind since Sweet Dub got laid off: in essence, this too shall pass. This happened to us, and it was neither good or bad, and something else will happen tomorrow, and that too shall pass. And life will go on.

“A weed is only a weed when we don’t like it. Children are only naughty if we don’t like their actions. Life only sucks if you judge it as bad.”

This is very hard for me, this dropping of judgment and expectations. Very, very hard. But it’s a great exercise in retraining your brain.

Back from the Doldrums

Well! I just dropped a bomb on you and then skedaddled away, even though so many of you so kindly took the time to comment and commiserate.

That’s not cool, and I apologize. What’s happened is that Sweet Dub got laid off and that very same day, our modem decided to die. What with one thing and another (oh, the intricacies of health insurance and COBRA and such, and by the way: SUMMER CAMP! You gotta start thinking about it! And by the way: cell phone! Sweet Dub’s was a company phone, so he suddenly didn’t have one and lost all his contacts! And hey: pinkeye! The baby got it! And T-ball! We are smack in the middle of T-ball season! And sickness! Sweet Dub and I are both neck-deep in phlegm! And exhaustion! And, scene.) – well, what I’m saying is, I’m pretty invested in keeping my job right now, so I’ve not been blogging at work, and I’ve had no Internet access at home, and I don’t have a Smartphone, so I’ve been somewhat off the grid in terms of blogging.

But here we are, and ten days post-layoff, we are managing to stay positive. I am trying to avoid thinking about health insurance because it makes my eye twitch, so I won’t go into that, but just know this: the Blah Blahs can’t ever catch a break with something like that. Every avenue I tried came back to this: I must pay through my employer for health insurance, and it is $1,100 a month. COBRA is not cheaper, and we don’t qualify for the federal subsidy because Sweet Dub is eligible for health insurance through my job.

But enough about that. (Already I can feel my blood pressure spiking and my heart rate increasing, just in writing those few sentences.) At least one of us has a job. And we have some severance pay and we have some savings (partly for the hypothetical house which is impossible to buy in Los Angeles anyway) and if worst comes to worst, we have credit lines that are not being used. But I would hate for it to come to that.

Here is where I should insert something pithy and somehow poignant and inspirational. But instead I want to tell you a silly story, because it’s finding the humor in the everyday that’s keeping me going right now, and maybe it will make you laugh, too.

Earlier this week, I discovered that if I said, “Ready, set –“ to Miss Celie, she would say, “GO!”* But she would say it with such force that she would literally rock forward on her toes and the vein in her neck would stand out. And then she would break into a huge grin, as pleased with herself as could be.

Last night, I was talking to my mom on the phone and I figured this was a perfect “show off to Grandma” moment, so I said to Miss Celie, “Ready, set –“ and she said, “No.”

Ready, set – NO. It’s kind of appropriate, I think.

* And she doesn’t pronounce it plainly, “GO,” it’s more like “Goh!” which for some reason is more endearing and harder to convey on the page.

Holy Crap

Sweet Dub just called me. He got laid off today.

Holy freakin' crap.

Seven

It was a Tuesday morning. Sweet Dub was working horrific hours at his job. When he left for work at 6 AM, he asked if I was okay. My hips had begun hurting pretty bad at about 4 AM, but I said, “I’m fine, go to work.” And then I said, “But if I call you and ask you to come home, it’s not an April Fools!” and I went back to sleep.

About an hour later, I woke up with the distinct feeling of being wet. “The final indignity has happened,” I thought. “I’ve peed myself.”

I hefted myself out of bed and padded into the bathroom, where I peed again. As I was washing my hands I felt like I was peeing on myself again. I could feel fluid running out.

“Did my water break? I think my water broke,” I said out loud to no one in particular. “Is that what this is? This is not what I thought it would be.”

And, seven years later, that pretty much sums up my journey of motherhood. It is not what I thought it would be. It is so much more of everything, I can’t even explain it.

That day, my life changed forever. At 7:22 PM, Viva rocketed into the world.

A few hours old

A few weeks later

And she’s been rocking my world ever since. But enough about me, because after all, it is her birthday. Here are her specific birthday instructions/requirements:

(1) I must sleep with her, in her tiny little bed, so we can wake up together all snuggly-like
(2) She does not care what she has for her birthday dinner, as long as there is cherry Jello for dessert
(3) She is having a class field trip, so no party at school (huge sigh of relief here)
(4) HOWEVER, she is inviting her entire 1st Grade class over to our house for a party next Saturday (insert nervous breakdown here)
(5) She must also sleep over at Auntie Lola’s Saturday night, so as to wake up at her house Sunday morning for an Easter egg hunt and thus, maximum birthday/Easter-type leveraging of wonderfulness

Ah, my girl. Was there ever one so amazing and superb? Her legs are ten feet long and she can tell you the plot of every SpongeBob episode EVER and sometimes she still does that thing where she says, “Remember when--?” and it’s about something that happened when I wasn’t even there, but she always assumes I am with her, all the time. It’s like she thinks I can see everything she is doing. Not quite in a creepy way, but like we are so connected that I must be able to see everything she does even when I’m not there. Like we are twins or something.

She is slow as molasses on a cold day, and quick as a whip, and all other kinds of similes and metaphors that I won’t bother employing here. She wants to be like all the other kids, and at the same time she wants to be different, and I get it, I really do. She is a complex little person. The other day she said:

“Mom, Ms. C only lets me get CHAPTER books out of the library.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I’m the only kid that has to read chapter books. No one else has to read chapter books.”

“I thought you get to choose whatever book you want,” I said.

“No, Ms. C picks our books,” Viva scowled. (Actually, I believe the process is that the teacher has to approve the books they’re checking out.)

“So what’s wrong with chapter books? Is she picking ones that are too hard for you?”

“NO,” Viva said.

“It’s just that you’re the only one who’s reading them?”

“Yeah,” Viva said. “The other kids get the easy books.”

I finally realized that she thinks the teacher is being hard on her, rather than recognizing her skill level and having her read what’s developmentally appropriate. I then tried to explain to Viva that it’s because she is so good at reading that Ms. C gives her the more advanced books, because she might be bored with the easy books. Viva was still skeptical, and still kind of pissed at being labeled different in some way, even though it’s because she is way beyond her grade level.

She has an innate sense of fairness, and she really could not give a damn what she looks like. Except she better have some cool sneakers on. If she could wear whatever she wanted every day, it would be basketball shorts, a T-shirt and some badass Adidas. She protests having her hair “did,” but refuses to get it cut. She loves the way her hair looks right after she gets out of the shower, and right after it’s been oiled and braided. She has a much higher tolerance for fuzzy edges than I do, and ducks when I try to swipe at her hairline with a brush in the morning.

She hates it when she is not excellent at something the first time she tries it. I mean, she hates it to the point where she will burst into tears and throw a racket down and say, “Tennis is so STUPID anyway!” I mean, like in the moment if she could she would take a flamethrower to the tennis racket, the tennis ball, and all of Wimbledon, Serena Williams be damned. I know that it is only time and a moderate level of maturity that make me a bit more mellow about things like this than she is, but at the same time, it is exasperating.

Three weeks later, she will be bouncing a tennis ball with her racket like she is a pro, rage forgotten. She is a tough cookie, and still a little girl who screams for her parents in the night when she has a bad dream. The Tooth Fairy is no fiction to her. Yesterday, we had a serious conversation about cartoon duck voices (from Donald Duck to the baby duck on Tom and Jerry, we covered the whole pantheon).

She is so distinctly herself. I really lucked out. So happy birthday to Viva, my sweet, smart, ever-growing knockout of a girl.

Sleep: The Last Unicorn*

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.
- Leo Burke

I was reading about sleep deprivation last night. And although I was reading a book** about child development, the book mentioned as part of its chapter on children and sleep that studies performed on adults who were averaging about 6 hours of sleep a night functioned similarly to individuals who had not slept in 24 hours.

I can’t remember the last time I had a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. I feel that I am irritable, prone to weepiness, and not ever functioning at optimum capacity. Not surprisingly, it’s not a good feeling.

One of the best ways, I have read, to ensure that you get enough sleep is to establish a bedtime for yourself. Before I became a parent, I pretty much just went to bed whenever I felt sleepy. This meant that some nights, I could get ten hours of sleep, or, if I was feeling particularly peppy, that I could stay up late and get by on five or six hours. Right now, with my sleep debt, the concept of eight full hours of sleep seems like the most heavenly thing imaginable. I told Sweet Dub last night that we need to get to bed by 10 PM. He thought that was really hilarious, and not really helpful, since we are being awakened every night in and around the 2 o’clock hour by Miss Celie. It takes at least 20-30 minutes for her to get back to sleep in the middle of the night, so even so we will not get a full eight hours of sleep.

We are the Crabby Blah Blahs. Hear us whimper.

P.S. it looks like Miss Celie may have another ear infection, so we’re heading back to the pediatrician this afternoon. (The screaming you hear is just inside my head.)

* By which I mean: it's rumored to exist, but has proved elusive. Have you ever read that book? I went through a Peter S. Beagle phase when I was about 15, but that is a tangent which I am cutting short --hmmm, right now.

** The extremely popular NurtureShock! Read it and weep! No, actually, it’s really fascinating, in the “I know I should go to bed but I just got sucked in to read the next chapter” kind of way. It pokes holes in a lot of assumptions we have about modern parenting. I’ve been wanting to read it for months, was waiting for it to come out in paperback, and finally just gave in and bought the hardcover. I regret nothing!

Skinny Mini

At our last pediatrician visit a couple of weeks ago, we discovered that Miss Celie had a “raging” ear infection (the doctor’s words, not mine), and that although she’d grown two inches since her last checkup five months ago (yes, we’re off schedule), she actually weighed less at 17 months than at 12 months. I know Celie is a horribly picky eater, and I had been dreading the appointment, because the list of foods she will eat is quite small, and lately she had begun rejecting certain foods that she previously would eat.

Dr. H said we might need to take her to an occupational therapist to work on her food aversion. (This is an actual thing, this food aversion!) But then she conferred with one of the other doctors in the practice and they came up with a plan whereby we are to offer Miss Celie food once an hour while she is awake. We are only to offer her foods which she actually likes, although they do want us to try giving her PediaSure or Carnation Instant Breakfast as a supplement. (It turns out she hates PediaSure and will only tolerate about one tablespoonful of Carnation Instant Breakfast in her milk.)

If she doesn’t gain weight on this plan, by April 21st, they will send us to jail. No, no, I kid. They will refer us to a nutritionist and possibly also an occupational therapist, who will re-teach her how to eat. (I am serious.) I don’t know if this comes through in my regular blogging, but we are actually pretty healthy, balanced-meal eaters. Viva has even commented that her teacher says she is the only kid who brings healthy snacks to school. (That is rather alarming and fodder for a whole post of its own.)

We are educated, middle-class, blah blah blah, which I hate even writing, but I feel like we have all the tools at our disposal for our little one to be healthy and flourishing. Is our kid failing to thrive? In all honesty, I walked away from the appointment with a giant lump in my throat, feeling like a terrible parent.

Sweet Dub’s reaction was similar: “I feel like we let her down,” he said.

Celie doesn’t look underweight. She has a layer of baby fat, and she has curvy little arms and legs. She has a little potbelly, as most healthy kids her age do. She isn’t fat, but her genetics are going to predispose her to that. Sweet Dub and I were both skinny kids and we are not large adults.

She’s also been teething, this time with molars, and she’s caught every cold that’s come down the pike. Her appetite has not been great. At the moment, she eats most kinds of fresh fruit*, cheese, some yogurt, applesauce, peanut butter, crackers of all types, some pasta, and that’s really it. Oh, and air, in the form of any kind of puffed veggie-type food item like Pirate’s Booty or Snapea Crisps. She won’t eat baby food, she won’t eat potatoes (except the occasional French fry, her one food vice), she won’t eat rice or bread, and she won’t eat any kind of meat. She also won’t eat tofu. She eats green beans and sometimes broccoli.

It’s tough. Sometime she will eat things they offer her at daycare and then she won’t eat the exact same thing at home. Months ago she tried peas from a classmate's plate, and ate a bunch of them. She would eat them at home, but then one day she refused and hasn't eaten a pea since.

She is often crabby, and I am quite sure she is just hungry. But if you offer her a food she doesn’t recognize she will turn her head away and screech until you remove it from her sight, or at least from her highchair.

Someday I will look back on this and shake my head at how overly concerned I was, as I watch Celie eat a bowl of ceviche or something. But for now, I’m in the thick of it, and feeling pretty bad.

P.S. My doctor even suggested feeding her ice cream to fatten her up. Not sure that’s the road I want to take – first of all because of the sugar, and second of all because I don’t want her to grow up thinking of ice cream as a food group. Talk to me in a couple of weeks if she still hasn't gained weight.


* Except bananas. What kid doesn’t eat bananas?

Avoidance

In direct contrast to the last couple of posts, today’s post is a bit fluffier. Think cotton candy. Sprinkled with just a light dusting of exasperation. Read on…

Well hey, it's that time of year again. What’s that, you say? Well, it’s Viva’s birthday! (Almost.) She will be seven in just nine more days – that’s right, she’s an April Fools baby. So I sent out birthday party invitations by email to some friends, and one emailed me back that she won’t be able to make it but by the way, she ran into the mom of one of Viva’s bestest besty friends in the whole world at the farmer’s market last weekend and the mom asked my friend to give me her phone numbers and call her because bestest besty friend misses her so much.

If they are bestest besty friends, you ask, why are we not in touch?

I’m so glad you asked. Viva and her friend (let’s call her BeBe) used to attend preschool together and were inseparable, and then her mom elected to take her out of private school and put her in a charter school. I’m not mad at that – if I could get Viva into a charter or magnet school, I would probably do the same.*

What I am mad at, and long-time readers (all two of you! Hi there!) may remember this, is that two years ago, we had decided to let Viva pick one friend to take to Disneyland for her birthday, and naturally Besty Best was that friend. I ran it by BeBe’s mom first, and told her no pressure, she didn’t have to decide right away. But I made it clear that we would pay for both of them to go with us for the whole day, and that food/treats/etc. were all part of the deal. Basically all they had to do was show up. And then I called her. And I called her. And she never took my calls. And I never heard back.

And you know, try explaining that to your 5-year-old. She was very upset, and I was all mama bear furious. (How dare you snub my kid? At least have the decency to call and say you can’t go, for whatever reason - make something up if you have to, for heaven's sake.) We ended up taking my sister and nephews and had a lovely time, despite my morning sickness and fatigue.

At any rate, I know what I should do. I should do the right thing, do what would make my kid happy, right? I should suck it up and call her. I know that. I just don’t want to!

* Just found out Viva got waitlisted for second grade at a charter school for the second year in a row. She is number 83 on the list. I love public school,** oh yes, I do.

** I’m not being sarcastic, I really do love public school. I just wish the ones in L.A. weren’t so hit and miss. And that the school-year schedule made sense for parents who work full-time and have no family support. I can’t really have my kid out of school for three weeks at a time at Christmas.

Sorrowful; Grieved; Sad

On Monday, a hospice liaison came to visit my Nanna. In light of the spread of her cancer, they discussed the options: radiation, chemotherapy, or palliative care. My grandmother chose palliative care, so a nurse came on Tuesday and brought a wheelchair, oxygen, a bench for the shower, and morphine; and came back on Wednesday to review her medication schedule with my mom. A hospice nurse will visit on a regular schedule from now on.

So those are the facts. My head is all awhirl and I feel kind of sick and sad. I'm trying to think positively. I don't want her to suffer. I feel horrible that my mom, an only child, is experiencing this long, torturous process all over again - my grandfather died of metastasized prostate cancer nearly 6 years ago, at home, with hospice care. It was awful, horribly awful.

Trying to think of something positive to say, but right now - I got nothing.

Tongue Tied.

I keep starting posts and deleting them today. When I re-read them, I feel they are hardly worth the effort of reading. So I delete. And then I rebuke myself sharply. And then I go sit in the corner and weep hot tears of futility. And then I think to myself, man, that salad I had for lunch is just not cutting it. I wish I had some chips or something. And then I realize that part of the problem is that I am so easily distracted these days. And then I go back to daydreaming about chips, and vacation, and the upcoming Macy’s sale.

Now that I am out of the habit of blogging it seems I can barely string two words together. Oh, noes!

I’ll try again tomorrow.

Mmm, chips.

Simple

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
-Confucius

I have a family member who insists on making huge grand life decisions with (seemingly) nary a thought to the consequences. I don’t understand why, when faced with two possible routes on the road of life, this person invariably seems to choose the one which is clearly marked, for all to see, “Train Wreck.”

It is very frustrating to get a phone call with details of the wreck after such a decision has been made. I am never sure what to say. I try not to be judgmental (I know! Laughable!). It is difficult.

Keep things simple, I want to say. Address one problem at a time. Don’t create additional drama when you already have enough going on.

And if you can, eat a piece of red velvet cake. It may help put things in perspective.

Something's Gotta Give

“Something’s gotta give,” we (as in Sweet Dub and I) keep telling each other. And yet it doesn’t.

We are stretched kind of thin these days. Work, for both of us, has been extremely demanding. We’ve been working on the weekends at times, trading off childcare with each other. For Sweet Dub, it looks like there will be no relief until June 18th, when the final project of the four he has slated must be done. Note that well, my friends. June 18th. Not to mention that whenever I can, I am driving up to visit my grandmother, who--it should be noted--has three kinds of cancer and is apparently too frail to have any treatment beyond pain medication.

We are a little fried, if you want to know. This morning, I went online to check Viva’s school schedule, and then I called Sweet Dub to tell him we need to make sure and schedule a vacation in late June.* And then I went online and did a little summer camp research. Have you noticed that it’s March?

Don’t wish your life away, I tell myself. These moments are important. Your kids are still so small. There must be time to sit down on the floor of the closet at the end of the day and take a little warm person into your lap and read “Please, Baby, Please” for the hundredth time. Or to sneak into bed with the Big Girl—the one with the legs that are ten feet long—and wake her up with raspberries and tickles. Is there anything quite like the giggle of a little kid?

I think not. And then there is Ella. I just can’t be too down when I listen to her.

When an irresistible force such as you
Meets an old immovable object like me
You can bet just as sure as you live
Something's gotta give, something's gotta give,
Something's gotta give.

Indeed.

* And not to be morbid or anything, but with my grandmother this sick, scheduling a getaway is probably not all that practical. What if something happened while we were away?

Still Snarky, Still Sleepy

Wow, so here I am, off to a raging start with this blogging thing in 2010. It’s February already and I’ve posted only 3 times this year. Three cheers for mediocrity!

I meant to post, really. But I am being eaten alive by work, have been semi-obsessively watching the catastrophe in Haiti, and had horrible medical news about two people I am very close to (okay, one who I am very close to, and one who I work with – we are friends, but not like we vacation together or anything. But still I wouldn’t wish what he’s going through upon anyone.)* Oh, and Sweet Dub has taken on a new project outside of work which necessitates a commitment of more free time than he has, and I have these two small kids (have I mentioned them to you, ever?) living in my house who seem to need me for things like food and laundry and cuddling. When I have a moment to myself I like to maybe read a book or go for a walk or even watch TV. So there’s that then.

Last night, Viva had a total meltdown when she was told she needed to stop playing Wii (which she never does on weekdays, so it was a special privilege to begin with) and go take a bath. She said some things! She stomped her feet! Sweet Dub said some more things in a loud and angry tone! She was sent to her room! Much loud crying and screaming commenced from behind the closed door!

And then Sweet Dub came to me, where I was feeding our pajama’d Cily her bedtime bottle and said: “You know, we didn’t think about this before we got married. Your mother and my mother? Oh my God, we have fused them together to get the perfect drama queen!”

Yikes. We are smart in so many other ways.

P.S. Do you remember this post? About the Overnight diapers? And maybe that’s why Cily wasn’t sleeping through the night? Yeah?

No. No, that wasn’t it. It was just a fluke. She still wakes up Every. Flippin’. Night. at sometime between 3 and 4 AM. You can call that morning if you want to be technical, but to me, it falls very squarely into the time when I want to sleep, hence NIGHT. Gahhhh. When 6 AM rolls around, I am too through!


* My grandma’s tests came back even worse than before. Her lung cancer is not operable; it has spread too far, which is a very bad sign, because even a couple of months ago doctors thought that if they could just get her healthy, they could perform surgery where they would resection her lung. Since it has spread that quickly in just a couple of months, I am very scared that this means her time here on earth is much shorter than we anticipated. Never mind the cancer in her stomach and whatever the hell is going on with her liver (inconclusive).

As for my work friend: his newborn baby has a one-in-a-million type of disorder for which the only solution is brain surgery. My heart breaks for him. I can’t even imagine. This is going to be a long and difficult journey and I can’t even crack any jokes about it, which is my default way of dealing with things when things are not going well. So you see the situation I'm in.

It’s the Economy…

Okay. So in reading here and there about my work life you may have surmised that I work in the nonprofit sector, and I do my best to raise money for the organization that employs me. In the down economy, this has been none too easy. The head of our department is preparing to be out of the office for a couple of weeks, and this morning he fixed me with a Look and said, “I was going over the numbers last night, and we’re in trouble.”

“I know,” I said. “We are in the hole.”

“No, we are really in trouble,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “We have been doing well raising money in certain areas, but for our annual fund [which provides general operating support], we are way down.”

“We need to get some more requests out,” he said. “And can you give me a list of everything that’s pending?”

I feel like we have been knocking ourselves out to prepare well-thought-out requests for support to funders who have an interest in what we do. Yet we keep getting declined.

Am I concerned about my job? Well, yes, I guess so. Common sense tells you that they’re not going to keep paying someone to TRY and raise money. They want to pay you to actually raise money. The past year or so has been disheartening to say the least.

So that’s where I am today. And I’m working on about four hours’ sleep. Dub and I stayed up talking until 11:30, Cily woke up at 11:50, and I didn’t get to sleep until close to 2 AM. And then, at 4:50 Dub came out and found me on the couch snuggled up with Cily and woke me up, insisting that I should come to bed. Can you imagine? How can I be married to this person?

My fury at being awakened was such that I could not get back to sleep for nearly 30 minutes. Dub woke me again at 6:25 to say he was leaving and I should get up or I’d be late. I wanted to hit him in the head with something but it was just too much trouble to move.

I miss my imaginary fantasy life, in which I’d get a full eight hours of sleep and wake up looking fabulous, to a clean house and children who would eat anything I put in front of them before we hopped into the mom-mobile and drove merrily off down the road, singing in perfect unison.

Did I mention how much I miss sleep? And how I’d like to keep my job? I guess those are the themes of the day.

An Unintentional Feminist Critique of Marriage

This morning:

Viva: Why can’t chickens fly?

Mama: Their wings are too small for their bodies.* So even though they’re birds, they can’t fly.

Viva: Oh, like bees! Bees really shouldn’t be able to fly but they do, even though their bodies are so big and their wings are so small.

Mama: Yeah, that’s right. They say that it should be impossible for bees to fly.

Viva: I’m glad I’m not a bee. They only live for three days, you know.

Mama: Yes, I do remember hearing that somewhere.

Viva: Yeah, one time? I was at M’s house and this bee did not like him, and every time he would go outside this bee would go after him. And after three days, like on the third day? The bee started slowing down because it was dying you know? And you know what M did? He buried it!

Mama: Really? I don’t think I’ve heard this story before.

Viva: Yeah, he took a cough drop box and he put the bee in it and then he dug a hole and he put the bee in the box in the hole and then he had a funeral for it? He sang like this: “Duh duhn da da…”

Takes a minute to realize that Viva (and/or her cousin) apparently believes that the “Here Comes the Bride” song is funeral music. Hilarious.


* Because they’ve been selectively bred to be extra-big in the breast for human eating purposes. Kind of gross when you think about it.

Feliz Ano, Internets!

So I'm posting. Anything to get the basset hounds off the screen!

Well, hello. Let me share with you the marvelousness of 2010 that has thus far overtaken me. For quite some time now, I have been sleep-deprived. I attributed my baby not sleeping through the night as not eating enough solids during the day. She wakes up because she's hungry, I thought. So she would wake up at around 3:45 or 4:00 AM every day, and I would change her diaper and feed her a bottle and put her back to bed, and I would eventually fall back to sleep and then when 6:00 AM rolled around I could not get out of bed to get to work on time. This went on, this ridiculous pattern, for eons of time.

Yesterday, I broke down and bought some Overnights diapers in despair. Lo and behold, the baby slept from 8:30 PM to 5:30 AM. Hey, guess what - she was waking up because she was wet, and cold from the wet! Poor thing.

Now that I have had one night of uninterrupted sleep, there's no telling what I might get up to. I have all kinds of ambitious plans. I might blog more regularly, even (though I won't recap my holiday season for you, because I just won't do that to you. There was family drama and that's all I wish to say.).

Consider yourself forewarned, is all. And to all a good night!

What on Earth Would Jesus Think?!

Basset Hound Nativity Set

Wow. I mean, WOW. I don’t even know what to say.

Um.

Oh.

Image brought to you courtesy of my new favorite site, Regretsy. Go now, trust me. And scroll through their archives. It's comic gold.

Oh, wait. Before you go: I thought I was struck speechless before, but now I may never talk again:

Poor Baby Jesus Meerkat. He looketh sore afraid.

Yeah. Wow. I’m…I just…wow.

Birds, Bees & Ogres

The Scene: it is Sunday night. I am doing Viva’s hair, a long process of sectioning and oiling and combing through each section and twisting each section down into one long plait, secured with a barrette. Because this is a long process, we generally watch a movie while it’s going on. It doesn’t take me the whole movie to finish her hair, but it’s a nice ritual involving microwave popcorn and lemonade.

The Movie: we are watching Shrek the Third. There is a point at which (spoilers ahead! For a movie that’s at least a couple of years old!) Shrek (the ogre, in case you’ve been living under a rock) is leaving on a quest in a large ship going out of the harbor. His wife Fiona is on shore and she calls out, “I’m pregnant!” Shrek is completely freaked out, and as the boat pulls away, the following conversation takes place:

Shrek: I can't believe I'm going to be a father. How did this happen?

Puss In Boots: Allow me to explain. When a man falls in love with a woman, he is overcome with powerful urges—

Shrek [yelling]: I know how it happened! I just can't believe it. [stomps off]

Donkey [to Puss]: How *does* it happen?

Viva [to me]: How *does* it happen?

Mama: Oh, well – you know, we’ve talked about this a little before. You know the daddy kind of plants a seed in the mommy and it grows into a baby.

Viva: But HOW does he do it?

Mama [biting the bullet]: Well, the daddy puts his [clinical term] into the mommy’s [clinical term] and—

Viva: Oh my GOD.

Mama: Yeah, that’s pretty much everyone’s reaction when they first find out. It sounds unbelievable, but that’s how it happens.

Viva: That is WEIRD.

Mama: Well, when two people love each other, it’s kind of like – it’s a very special kind of hugging that they do.

Viva: You mean a very WEIRD kind of hugging.

Mama: Okay then.

And by then we were on to the scene where Shrek is having nightmares about ogre babies projectile vomiting and crying and having multiple near-accidents, and that was the end of that.

I’ve shared this story with a few people since then, and the reaction seems to be: “Wow, I can’t believe you straight out told her like that.”

I’m really not sure what else I was expected to do. She asked me a question and I answered honestly in a spur-of-the-moment way that I hope was age-appropriate. I want her to feel she can ask me anything, and I don’t want her to feel like the Big Topics are off-limits. And it seems to me that 6 is a pretty reasonable age for her to be curious about where babies come from, and that now I can go ahead and get a book like this, or this, or this, for us to read together and talk if she wants to. (I think when I was little I read this. I wonder if it’s held up over the years or if it’s dated.)

At any rate, I would love to hear from you about your experiences talking with your own kids, or your own “birds and the bees” talk with your parent(s), if you ever had The Talk. My mom was always very frank with me and my sister, and I’d like to be the same way with my kids. Curious to hear other people's experiences! PG only please!

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

You should write a book, they say.

Oh my God, that’s hilarious. When are you going to write about it?

If you don’t write all this stuff down, you’ll lose it.

At the same time: work, sickness, two small kids. November started with the flu and ended with some gastrointestinal horrors, sandwiched around but not related to or caused by Thanksgiving. A small girl who is lonely and whose tummy hurts and who wants her mama. An even smaller girl who wants to be in the middle of where everyone is, who repeats over and over in the sweetest voice imaginable, “Uh-oh!” about everything.

And the holidays! They are upon us. Good grief.

Where will I find the time?

I lost a week of work this month to illness. I am so terribly behind. I worked at home during the Thanksgiving weekend. I worked this evening after putting the kids to bed. Speaking of which, the baby (soon-to-be-toddler) is waking up three times a night. It is like she has regressed back to the early days. And, exhausted, my sweet husband has passed out next to the baby. He is snoring softly. And just in thinking of him I think, his birthday is coming up. Yet another twinge of guilt and despair! How will I get it all done?

I need time for myself – time to exercise, time to write things that aren’t for work, time to get my hair cut. I am feeling a bit raggedy. I breathe. I am thankful, don’t get it twisted. My little family is such a swirling tide of love. I just feel like I am constantly pulling together a shawl that is unraveling and getting smaller all the time. It just won’t cover me.

And in taking the time to write it down, at least I can look back and remember what on earth was going on. And find the humor in it. Ha. Ha. Yes, and ha.

Thankfully, Los Angeles does not disappoint. Last week, I was driving south on Crenshaw Blvd. and just as I reached the red light at Jefferson, I saw a bright orange ice-cream-type truck turn left onto Crenshaw. That truck, my friends, was the Grilled Cheese Truck. Now, THAT is fabulousness made real. The Grilled Cheese Truck just made its debut in October of this year, so I feel I am almost somewhat on the cutting edge in reporting this to you. They tweet and publish a schedule of when the truck will be in various locations so you can go get a fresh grilled cheese sandwich when the mood strikes. Among other things, they do a Gruyere melt, which sounds divine.

Yup, Grilled Cheese Truck. You heard it here first (maybe). Now I must arise from the laptop and collapse into bed, at which point no doubt the Babe will awake and I will suppress the urge to scream. One love, all. One love.

On the Mend

The Blah Blahs are recovering from whatever horrible ailment that was. And thus and so we have all returned to “normal” life, off to work and school and day care. Cily did not seem so sure about day care this morning. She had a rough night and her cheeks are kind of swollen, indicating to me that teeth are about to break through. Cily would not eat breakfast, and neither would Viva, and I fretted a bit about it in the car as we tootled off to begin our days, but then Viva could not stop telling me the entire plot of the Captain Underpants book she read last night, and Cily chimed in loudly here and there cheerfully, at times talking over her sister (she is not quite clear on conversational concepts yet, but would feel right at home with some of my closest friends who, and they know who they are, can’t quite ever let one get a full sentence out without bursting out with an exclamation) and so I managed to get over it, letting Viva out of the car at school with a Tupperware of dry cereal to munch on and handing a bottle to Cily’s day care provider as I handed her over. And then somehow I drank two cups of coffee at work and got to lunchtime and realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast either.

Soup is the answer. I think it cures all kinds of ills.

But Not the Flu

Today I am sick.

Darling Sweet Dub is sick.

Precious Cily is sick.

Viva: healthy as all get-out and raring to go. What adventure awaits her today?

I am at work, having come in just to make edits and print and mail out a project so I can cross it off my “to do” list. It is quiet here today – about half the staff in our department are out at a conference. I am enjoying the calm.

Soon I will make phone calls, and I will sketch out my next assignment, and I will leave here and pick up Cily from the lovely and loving women who care for her all day. Cily, sweet Cily gives kisses to all of us without pursing her lips. Sometimes they are open-mouthed kisses, and she chews a little bit on your face, kind of thoughtful-like, before moving on to smear her spit on your cheek. I am guessing this is how both Sweet Dub and I got sick, since who can resist her?

I will try and work from home for the rest of the day. Cily, I know, may not cooperate. But I will first make my phone calls and see what avenue to take next, and then maybe once we get home she will nap. And I may sneak some pictures of her because she is so scrumptious.

And that other girl, Viva, will come home victorious from whatever she has done today and declare that I am the best mom ever because when I make myself a cup of tea I automatically make her a cup of hot cocoa. And I will try not to give her my germs, but it will be hard, because who can resist her?

And maybe for Sweet Dub, I will make some chicken soup to share. He too is at work. (What a crazy life – we all have “too much to do.”) So he will come home and all of us will collapse in bed together and he will be so sweet with the children as we all loll about that I might have to kiss him and share his germs too, because how can I resist him?

So that is the plan for the day. Be well, my friends.

Terribly Out of Fashion

Transcript of recent conversation with my 6-year-old.

Viva: Why are you wearing (pause for effect) THOSE earrings?

Mama: These? (feels ears because can’t remember which ones) Oh, these. Um, I don’t know, I never wear them and Daddy gave them to me and so I thought today I would wear them. Why? Don’t you like them?

Viva: Well, Mah-OM (like she doesn’t know exactly how to tell me this): they look like boys’ earrings.

Mama: (busts out laughing) OH! MY. GOD! HONEY!

Sweet Dub (from another part of the house): WHUH?

Mama: Come and hear what your child is saying.

Viva: What? They DO.

Sweet Dub: What?

Mama: Listen to what has become of this generation. Your child thinks these look like boys’ earrings.

Sweet Dub (bursts out laughing) Oh, no. Really? Is that what we’ve come to?

Mama: Bling bling.

Note: The earrings in question are diamond studs. I have a tendency to wear dangly earrings mostly, so I hardly ever wear them. It appears that all the young men who like the hippity-hop music wear earrings like this and thus have ruined them forever for everyone else. Evidently I can’t yet wear them as a subversive, arch act of turning fashion on its head because people will just think I’m out of touch rather than cutting edge. Woe is me.

365

One year ago today, I posted this:

I've been having contractions since 5:30 or so this morning. They have been intensifying but are still not at the magic "every 5 minutes, 1 minute in duration" level. Nonetheless, we've kept Viva home from school while we wait to see what happens and we've got all local family members on standby. I am cramping, hips are extra sore, back is killing me. It feels like this is it.

Happy 1st Birthday, Celia, my love. You are tremendous and I love you even more today than 365 short days ago when we first met. I am sorry that you woke up on today of all days cold and wet and with poop in your pants. Hopefully, each birthday will be better than the last!

Cily, about 10 minutes after waking up cold and wet (her diaper leaked) and with poop in her pants. Approximately 5 AM today.

Help Me Win a Trip to Disneyland!

Okay, you know I am not one to toot my own horn, BUT: would you please vote for me? Los Angelista is running a VIP Disneyland giveaway on her site and I’m a semi-finalist! If I win, I get to join Los Angelista’s family on November 21st with 3 guests (guess who? If you guessed Sweet Dub, Viva and Cily, right on) for the VIP treatment at Disneyland. How fun is that? And all made possible by the modern miracle that is the Internet. I’ve emailed back and forth for maybe years now with Liz (Los Angelista), but somehow we have never met in person. This could be our chance! (Well, we’ll probably meet anyway at some point, but how great to meet at the Happiest Place on Earth?)

You can vote for me by clicking here and leaving a comment! Thank you!