a minute ago i was folding kitchen towels and rags and stuff, and i found myself picking things from the middle of the basket to fold. i thought for a minute that i was just picking up a towel from the middle because i wanted to fold all the towels first. but no. in fact, there were 3 other towels on top that i could have grabbed. so why, OH WHY, did i ignore the TOP towels and dig around for the towel in the MIDDLE?! this bothered my for the entire 5 minutes that i folded the kitchen stuff–i’m actually still trying to get over it–and i literally had to FORCE myself to only pick things from the top until i was done. so is this what being a stay-at-home mom does to a person– a presumably, normal, sane person? or do people who work away from home have the same neurotic thought processes when they come home and do laundry? i hope they do. i really, really hope they do.

an update on the boy coming soon…

Posted on June 17th, 2004

seb’s 1 yr well-baby check up was this past friday and here are the results:

height 30 in (3 in growth since mid-february)
weight 18 lb 11 oz (up a wopping 8 oz since march)
head circumference 47 cm (this is the one thing that has remained textbook 50%)

seb was shot up for mmr and chickenpox and all the blood from one of his little tiny fingers was forced out for a hemoglobin test. seb sobbed, mamma and daddy cringed and held their breath. dr appts are not fun stuff.

Posted on June 7th, 2004

well, we finally went camping friday night, and it was good. let me qualify “good”: we got some sleep, the amount varying for each one of us (seb probably got the most), we only woke the campground once at 5 am, and it was character building–we learned a lot. most important lesson, try to arrive at the campground BEFORE your child’s bedtime–not during, or for crying outloud, after. due to some logistical difficulties, we pulled into the campground at 9:30p and were set up by 10p. seb had fallen asleep in the car, his bedtime normally around 8p, and really didn’t like being awakened to a very strange, dark and chilly place with flickering lights and voices of unseen multitudes. so it was hard to get him to sleep, although not impossible. once i did get him to sleep, it was awkward keeping him situated on his sleeping pad. throughout the night, seb’s head kept sliding onto the tent-floor from his sleeping pad due to a slight dip in the ground, and i had to keep pulling him back to a better spot. even i found myself crammed into the corner on more than one occasion. anyway, he awoke for a brief (at the time it seemed like he was crying forever) period around 5a, but went back to sleep until 7:30a, so it definitely could have been worse. only two times did i imagine hearing someone grumble “baby” that morning before we left, and more than likely it was from the group of drinkers who stayed up until 4a. oh well.

so i think we’ll do it again. maybe even soon and somewhere a little further away from home.

Posted on June 1st, 2004

for those of you with queasy stomachs at the mention of any type of body fluid, or not so fluid fluid, and for those of you who hate parents who only talk about their kids poop, stop reading now. i have just had a horrific 30 minutes, and i’m using this to vent.

this morning brian donned seb with a soft, brand new white diaper. yes, today is the first day of the cloth diapering adventure. we lauded the joy of using a contour diaper (no fighting with folding a bulky square of cloth) made of soft organic cotton. we discussed how much more comfortable seb would be in them. he looked so cherubic in the pillowy, softness. then we took seb downstairs to play and eat breakfast, and before we knew it, seb was working on a poo.

brian promptly left for work. oh joy.

i decided not to put off the deed and took seb upstairs to change the new, white diaper. how bad could it be really? seb is eating solid food now. for the most part, his poo is usually left for us in a nice managable package. well, i don’t know WHAT this kid ate yesterday, but something went horribly, horribly wrong. to say the least, the diaper was not even close to being white anymore. in fact, there was poo EVERYWHERE. poo had found its way out of every possible space in the diaper AND the diaper cover. it was as if seb had reverted to his days of only breastfeeding. no, nothing solid about this poo. no package necessary, apparently.

by the time i had seb cleaned up and clothed in a new, bright, shiny, cloth diaper and placed in his crib (wailing at the top of his lungs for freedom the ENTIRE time) for safekeeping, i realized that the work had only just begun. i now had to deal with the poo-covered diaper–something i had not really had to deal with before. oh my. the websites that give you a step by step on how to clean cloth diapers don’t give advice for the messy pooper. they say things like, knock stool into toilet and place in diaper pail. my question: what if the poo isn’t the knocking-off type? the poo that i had to deal with this morning was not letting go of that new, soft diaper without a fight. well, i fought and flushed and fought and flushed and fought and flushed… i’m still not sure who won that match. at some point i just quit fighting and flushing and wrung the thing out and hid it away in the diaper pail liner. oh yeah, and that’s another thing. if you think you can get away with starting the whole cloth diapering thing without all the accoutrements (pails, pail liners, deodorizers), take it from me, you’re sorely mistaken. yeah, so upstairs is a scary, smelly diaper and cover stashed away in a liner without a pail or a deodorizer. wanna come over?

that about wraps up my 30 minutes of poo hell, without talking about the feeling of poo squishing through my fingers… i’m trying not to take this as a sign from God himself that i am not cut out for using cloth diapers. i’m trying to take is as a challenge to keep going even in the face of peril. I WILL USE CLOTH DIAPERS, I WILL!! *shakes fist towards the sky*

*whew* i feel a bit better now.

Posted on May 27th, 2004

well, it’s time i update this thing… hmmm. what to tell, what to tell. there is so much going on–seb is nearly a toddler, we’re living in our very own home, the price of gas is obscene. it’s been hard to find the right time to sit down and write. heh, right time to write…. heh. anyway…

seb has decided that turning 12 months old is a big deal. almost from the moment he hit this age, he has been doing new and amazing things on a daily basis. it’s as if he woke up the morning of may 12, and said to himself, “well, now that i’m 1, it’s time i started acting like it.” i think the first new item on the list of “new things to do on my birthday” was meowing like a cat. so i, or anyone else can say, “hey seb, what’s a kitty-cat say?” and he replies, “meow.” the second item was to make car sounds, which was very appropriate since he received many cars or car-like things as gifts. it’s a sort of *vroom vroom* sound while he wheels his mini cars all over the first floor of the house. and he has become fairly adept at crawling on one hand while pushing the car with the other hand without having to pick that pushing hand up off the floor. impressive. i’m trying to get him to differentiate between the sound a car makes and other things–“a train goes chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga choo-choo, seb.” i caught him one day this week “driving” his favorite peice of toast around on his highchair tray. i’m not sure he quite gets it yet.

one thing seb has not eschewed since his first birthday as being infantile, and i truly wish that he would, is the whole drooling thing. he’s a mess most of the time, a big dark spitty stain on the front of his clothes if he’s wearing them, a sticky stream running down his chest and belly into his diaper if he’s not. and i’ve realized lately that most kids his age have the drool monster under some semblance of control, only letting it out of its cage when their teeth come in. not seb. i’m trying to come to terms with this fact: seb IS the drool monster. he is not aware of the “teething rule”.

ah yes, and this is the week i have chosen to return to the world of cloth diapering. this time, instead of using a service, i’m doing it myself. i figure, if i buy all the diapers and covers and detergent, etc., i’ll be sure to stick with it (right?). this way too, i can get the cool contour diapers and the all-in-one diapers and the hemp diapers. in a very sick way, i am just as satisfied after a good day of cloth diaper shopping for seb as i am clothes shopping for myself. there must be something wrong with me.

Posted on May 25th, 2004

fire! fire! (mama is attempting to blow out the fire before the finger gets to it–one of a couple fire catastrophies i was able to avoid. the other involved the entire house.)

mirror, mirror, up against the wall, who’s the cutest one-year-old of them all?

seb grew a lot of brain on his birthday and decided to put together all his toys himself!

the novelty of the playthings on the front of the walker was too much of a distraction to actually walk with it… that wore off in a day or two and now he cruises.

we are proud to report that seb ate 90% of his birthday cake.

Posted on May 18th, 2004

more b’day pics later…

Posted on May 13th, 2004

it’s raining today and we’re all sick. all i can really say is, this sucks! spring seems like it’s taking forever in coming (yeesh, will i ever stop complaining about the weather??). guess i have to take the whole “april showers…” proverb to heart. guess the “sun will come out tomorrow….” or more likely next month.

this cold for sebastien is a little worse than the first one a couple of months ago–a mild fever accompanied the copious amounts of mucus leaving his nose. let me tell you, that slight raise in the boy’s temperature sure was a mind job for this first-time mamma! sure, on the outside, i was only mildly concerned while administering tylenol to him. i sang and rocked him to sleep with my usual good cheer. but on the inside i had that kid admitted to the hospital with i.v.s and stuff. visions of him having those high fever seizures danced in my head. i imagined him afflicted with a rare lung disease… yet minutes before i would be on my way to Bedlam with worry, he was resting comfortably in his crib blowing little snot bubbles in his sleep. *shew* rest assured, i doubt it will be this little, trifling cold to keep him from reaching his first birthday–which, i might add, is only in ONE MONTH!

seb has been standing for almost a minute at a time the past couple of days. it’s funny to see him sway back and forth. he rocks on his little feet and digs his tiny toes into the carpet fighting gravity. he just looks at us and grins, as if he’s saying, “i am sooooo goooood.” he is so cute! and on Easter, when we went to retrieve him from his crib after naptime, he was standing there awaiting us very calmly, like we were late, like he’d been waiting there patiently his entire life.

favorite book of the week, or maybe the past two weeks, is brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?. okay, is it a problem or a bad sign if an 11 month old REALLY, REALLY likes the picture of the black sheep? i mean, he’s not relating to the whole “black sheep” concept already, is he? and his new favorite picture in goodnight moon is the cow jumping over the moon. or wait, is it the bowl full of mush? it’s hard to tell.

Posted on April 12th, 2004

Posted on March 27th, 2004

seb now has a whole mouth full. well, that’s what it looks like to me. i’ve already lamented the loss of his gums, so i won’t go there again. but man, these teeth veritably explode out of his swollen gums. it just looks uncomfortable. he apparently handles it pretty well. brian and i always think it’s the end of the world when seb gets a little grumpy for a couple of days, but according to other parents, that’s nothing. he did just graduate from “motrin anonymous” though. it took him a couple of days to detox.

and i have figured out why seb doesn’t want to commit himself to “real” crawling: how else would he get such a close view of the carpet so that he can successfully eat EVERY peice of dirt and cat hair in his path? although, my point to him is, if he would just get up on those knees, he could cover more ground in less time. oh, for the LOVE! hopefully he too won’t start coughing up hairballs. we have enough of that fun already.

sorry, this one is a little on the dark and fuzzy side. i just couldn’t go with the flash pic. the ambience was all off. daddy reads goodnight moon to the boy before he goes to sleep. well, he has for the past 4 nights, so now i think it’s officially a habit according to “the baby whisperer”. the jury is still out on whether seb actually “listens” to the story, but he’s very intent on turning the pages. we usually have trouble keeping up with him. his absolute favorite page in the whole book is the black and white drawing of the mittens (“goodnight mittens…”). he goes all apey about it, squealing and stuff. i don’t know, maybe i shouldn’t be divulging his deep, dark secret to the world…

Posted on March 24th, 2004