The fan club grows

Meet some more members...

Myspace Revelation

It's not that I don't have a life.
In between feeding baby and folding laundry and scrubbing stuff, I will have you know that I live in a world filled with mystique and glamor. And it's tough work, fitting in all the glamor and ritz with my many many important activities and daily obligations, thank you, so I am just as busy as a bee when I'm not immobilized by the somewhat limiting positions I must assume in order to feed Little One. However since Little One, who is growing at the rate of a car that just held up a Quick Mart, wants to be fed pretty darn often, I spend a fair amount of time sitting here. Glamorously. Of course.
This is why I have the ability to type these words I'm typing right now. It also means that in order to remain awake, I get to check my email, and the local news, and the stock market. Ha ha! Just kidding on the last one. But anyhow when I run out of big, important Things To Do While Sitting Here, I sometimes read those silly bulletins people post with you know, like, "500 thousand and thirty one things about ME that no one really wants to know"! This is usually sort of the bottom of the barrel for me, boredom wise. But it happens. Not that I don't have a life. Mind you.
SO a minute ago I was reading one, more for the thought provoking questions than anything (hmmm....if I were an ice cream flavor, which one would I be???) and this one question popped out at me. It was "what do you want in life more than anything in the world?"
And I realized something, pretty cool, all at once. Which makes me see now that I really do have a glamorous life. Because I realized that if I were to answer that question, honestly, it would be: "exactly what I've got".

Warning: Parenting may cause loss of convicitions

I have received several responses to the picture of Little One a few posts ago. Ranging from, "I can't believe there is a pacifier in that child's mouth" to "ha! I knew you'd put a pacifier in that child's mouth!"
Well, it's not like I dislike pacifiers like I do french fries. It's not like I hate them like I do soda or video games where there's shooting people. Or despise them like those Bratz dolls, which are like my Mommying nemesis. In fact if me and Bratz dolls ever met in an alley somewhere, I'm pretty sure we'd start circling each other and snapping emphatically (c'mon people, West Side Story!). But it's true that pacifiers and I have been only coolly civil towards one another. I did not, I confess, plan on inviting Pacifiers to the Little One party.
The reason is this. If some person came up to me and told me that they were going to punch me in the face, no way to avoid it, but I could choose whether to get punched right then, or instead at some nebulous point in the future, well, I'd point right at my cheekbone and say, "put 'er there, pal". Because I'd rather just get it over with.
That is the thing about pacifiers. They do stop the crying- for now. But they are like baby caffeine. At first it's just a little pick me up here and there, and then before you know it you have to have it every day or you might get all Garfield on a Monday, and soon you're blowing your rent money on Starbucks. And, unless you want your child to be sporting the binky in kindergarten, it has to go at some point.
Giving a child something addictive and then taking it away = CRYING. Aaaaaaand we're back to square one. And I have seen some truly epic battles over trying to ectomy the pacifier. And I have known lots of babies who can't sleep through the night because they haven't learned to soothe themselves, so when the pacifier falls out they have to scream until someone sticks that cork back in the bottle.
So it the scheme of things, it seems sort of counterproductive. However. As my Doctor astutely observed, doing no good for my resolve at all, Little One is immensely comforted by sucking. Some babies have a strong instinct for that and some don't care, and Little One is definitely leading category one. Without a pacifier, she will try to hoover up her hands, your hands, her outfit, whatever she can get to. And when she does, it makes her feel lots better. And, as we all know now, there are times (punctually 6-10pm, in fact) that she is pretty darn unhappy.
In other words, I plead GERD.
Yeah, yeah, I folded. Like an origami chicken. I confess! Truth be told, that thing is a miracle. Pacifiers and me, we've mended fences and become pals. I pretty regularly invite Pacifiers to hang out these days. To come to dinner, for instance, or out on errands. I still think J and I have set ourselves up for hard times later, but the cost-benefit balance seems to have shifted based on the altered decible levels in our house since Pacifiers and I made up.
That's right, I'm a sucker. A softy, a pushover, a sissypants! But I am a sucker with a much happier Little One, and far less homicidal neighbors. So go ahead and rub it in, just don't get any Big Ideas here, people. First one to give Little One a Bratz doll gets the alley-dance. AND snapping.

AIDS Day

I know I'm day late, but yesterday was world AIDS day.
As most of you know, I have some very special awesome friends who are HIV positive, and a lot of special friends who have been deeply affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Most of these someones are children.
I tried to think of what I could say about world AIDS day, but everything I tried to write sounded awfully soap-boxy. Instead, I'm going to write down a few of the things I wish everyone knew about HIV/AIDS, and if you want to do something to help, you can spread the word too.
And if you REALLY want to do something to help, please go to http://www.artistsforcharity.org/ or contact me about how to donate to the amazing children at AFC who have lost their parents to AIDS and are growing up HIV positive. And if you live in DC, check out the benefit for AFC on December 5th!

Things I wish people knew about HIV/AIDS:

HIV and AIDS are not the same thing. HIV is a virus, which can be contracted from another person. AIDS is a syndrome, which is not contagious. AIDS is a set of symptoms which develop after some time if a person does not undergo treatment for HIV. Not everyone with HIV will develop AIDS.

HIV is NOT a death sentence. HIV is now considered a chronic but manageable disease, such as diabetes or hepatitis.

It is, in fact, considered in many cases to be easier to manage than both of those diseases.

People with HIV can live 'indefinitely', and children born HIV positive can usually expect to grow up and lead healthy, relatively normal lives. *as long as they have access to treatment*

HIV is NOT spread through casual contact- such as sharing toys, even toothbrushes, food, dishes, clothes, etc, coughing, sneezing, hugging, kissing, pool or bathwater, or through contact with urine, tears, sweat or spit.

HIV is ONLY spread through sex, breastfeeding, blood-blood contact (almost exclusively sharing of needles), or through pregnancy/childbirth.

With proper medication, pregnancy/childbirth barely makes that list- only a 2% chance of passing on HIV to a fetus/infant with currently available meds.

You are really the only one who can protect you from HIV. You can protect yourself by always practicing safe sex, and by never sharing needles. It is within your power to prevent contracting HIV.

HIV/AIDS is a lot more common than you might think. Statistically speaking, odds are that you know or have met someone who is positive.

People with HIV or AIDS are not a threat to you or to anyone else. Unless you plan on having unprotected sex or sharing needles with that person, it is virtually impossible for you to become infected.

People with HIV or AIDS are people. Really! They deserve to be treated with respect and compassion, as all people do. They deserve to have full lives and rights, as all people do.

The worst, scariest thing about HIV/AIDS in so many ways is not the physical aspect, but the stigma. Many other diseases are much more contagious and much more life-threatening or limiting, and yet HIV continues to carry a huge stigma entrenched in fear and lack of education about the facts.

You can get more info at: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/transmission.htm

One of the best things we can all do to help those affected by HIV/AIDS is to be one less person who is uneducated, one less person harboring needless stereotypes, one less person reacting out of fear rather than awareness.

Even better- tell someone else. Spread the word!


The kids at AFC

Thankful for burning the biscuits

Last year we had an awesome Thanksgiving because my whole entire family came and it was a great big party. Well, my infamous cooking is probably to blame, but this year J and I were on our own. Because we are planning a huge trip to see everyone (ha, you think you can escape us by not coming for Thanksgiving?! We will gladly bring GERD-baby to you) in December, we decided it was just as well that we chill a little for this holiday. Especially because J is in the thick of studying for boards. And also we have been too sleep deprived to keep up with our social calendar this week already.
So we decided to keep everything low key. But then I overheard J say to friend on the phone, "I dunno, probably we'll have some leftover chili or something". And it just sounded wrong. So Little One and I went on a mission to Save Thanksgiving! I'm thinking They might make a Hollywood children's special out of it for next year.
I went to the store to gather supplies for Operation Tofurkey, and I promise I did not go to all the ones that were closed just because it was my first time out without Little One. Actually I kind of missed her. Several grocery stores jam-packed with panicked patrons who had waited until the last minute and were frantically beseeching employees as to whether they might have every foodstuff known to man in a can, I came home with some items. Which were obviously "special for the holiday" as advertised, or surely they would not have cost so much more than they do the rest of the year.
I came home and Little One and I got cookin. Because Little One wanted so badly to help that she got quite upset when not participating in the action, we made a lot of the dishes together, and so I am now happy to report that I've got a pretty good act worked out should Little One and I ever need to run away and join the circus!
This turned out to be a good thing. As I mentioned earlier, my cooking skills are infamous. The thing is that the level of anxiety I have over making a good meal is inversely proportional to the edibility of said meal.
For example, one of the few things I can reliably make that turns out pretty well is my mom's apple pie. It's pretty tasty, if I do say so. Which is why I decided, when J and I were dating, to make one for his family. Well, take into account the fact that it was the first thing I had cooked for these people, and the fact that J's mom makes Martha Stewart look like a third-rate fry cook, I was nervous as heck about getting that pie to be my Best Ever. So naturally, it turned out more like apple soup with some crusty little globs of dough floating about the top like sad little glaciers.
J has inherited some chef talent from his mom (not that I will EVER complain about that. I consider it to be one of the greater bonus points awarded to me by the cosmos). Plus he is also J. Which means he's all cute and awesome and everything, and I want to impress him so I can trick him into being my boyfriend. Which means, obviously, that everything I make for him is horrid. Even toast. Seriously.
So dinner could have been a true fiasco, but Little One saved the day, I think, by completely distracting me from how much I wanted J to like it. Thanks Little One! I think everything turned out not to be a hazard to anyone's teeth or general health! And then the best part is, we all sat down, my little family, for the first time, and had Thanksgiving dinner together.Now. Thanksgiving, like any holiday really, is kind of arbitrary. It's just another day, that someone gave a fancy name to, giving us a reason to overspend, overeat, overextend. But I'm glad that we decided to go ahead and celebrate. Because holidays are also a reminder to pause in our busy lives, change perspectives a minute and focus on things that do matter. Especially today.
Thinking about everything I have to be thankful for this year is just completely overwhelming. It always is, of course, because I have been pretty lucky from the get go having been born into a family that loves me, and not having lost any limbs trying to cook or anything like that.
But this year...whoa. Of course, Little One sort of tops the chart just by existing in our lives. But She also makes me so much more grateful for things I usually take for granted.
I find myself thinking things like, "Thank goodness for the excellent health care we have. Thank goodness for the maintenence of these roads and the invention of car seats. Thank heavens for central heating, for smoke alarms, for having two strong legs to do the Living Room Marathon with".
I can't help thinking today about so many moms I've known, and the millions more I'll never meet, who don't have those things. I think about the kids who don't have warm homes, enough food, or families to love them. Who don't have safe lives or certain futures and who are thankful anyways. It makes me ache for all the mothers who's babies are in danger, and all the little ones out there who don't have Enough. But it also makes me that much more intensely aware and grateful of all I have.
We’re all healthy. We have our home, our families, each other. We live in a place and time where we don’t have to fear for our safety or future. Where I can tell Little One that she can be anything she wants when she grows up- and the opportunity for that is real. Today I am so thankful for so many things. But most of all, I'm thankful my life is such that I lived a whole day, and my biggest worry was burning the biscuits. That's really something.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you- I'm thankful for you, too. :)

It's a Thanksgiving MIRacle!

So I want to do a Thanksgiving post when I can, but I just have to take a minute to mark down this glorious moment in history. Last night. Last night, we put Little One to bed at her usual 10pm. After a string of the worst nights of the GERDish era- a time we shall ever refer to as "The Great Cry"- we were not at all surprised when She woke back up screaming at 10:20.
But, BUT: I gave Her a cuddle, put her back down- at 10:30, sans pacifier mind you-and She slept until (*drumroll...drumroll...cymbals crashing...drumroll...*) FOUR thirty am! Four THIRTY!
And, AND: that's not all. At 4:30 I fed her, put her back down-no pacifier, none whatsoever, and She slept until 6!
That is a total of over SEVEN hours of sleep my friend! Uh huh. I wish I had video on this thing. Because then I could show you how I have taken all this extra energy I got from sleeping so much and blown it all in one place on my fantasticaly spectacular Happy Dance. I might even, no I think I will, raise the roof a little bit.
Talk about something to be thankful for. :)

Scientific conclusion:

No Dice.

The Experiment

As I type, I am conducting an experiment. And Little One is my subject. Here is why.
We've been hanging in there pretty ok the last week or so, and I hate to risk jinxing myself (again) but I think that we may have reached the apex of the GERDishness and are beginning a slow, halting, but progressive decrescendo.
She still gets fussy around 6pm, but doesn't really gather steam until around 8. The best part is we've been pretty well able to get her to be asleep in her cradle at 10, so that's only really 2 hours of Little One's operetics, so that's not so bad. (She may only sleep 20 minutes, but at least the crying stops then)
Even better, we thought, was that with the help of my new friend the Pacifier (that's a whole other post) the last few days we've even been able to get away with not much actual screaming at all. We still do the Living Room Marathon. We still turn her this way and that way, like a little rotisserie, trying to help her get comfier, and we do enlist the Pacifier's services pretty heavily in those 2 hours, but the volume level is blessedly low. I mean, in comparrison.
Last night, in fact, she slept practically through the whole thing. We thought we'd put one over on Little One. We sat there on the couch, J and I, looking at her closed little eyes and, especially, at her closed little mouth, and said, "hee hee!" and just thought that we were really getting away with something. Something even better than when we tricked the dogs into thinking ice was a treat so we could save a small fortune in milk bones. We thought we'd won ourselves a night of freedom!
Sadly, no.
Little One does not shirk her responsibilities. She woke up right around bedtime to find herself being put into pajamas. She knew that this could mean only one thing- she had totally missed an appointment. Slept right through her nightly obligations! So, being responsible and not wanting to skip out on her duties, she promptly made up for lost time. She made up for it all. night. long. ALL night long.
So, tonight, which has turned out to be another miracle night in which she seemed not to be in much discomfort and therefore not shrieking, I decided to do an experiment. Starting about 7pm, Little One and I had some special "mommy and me" time. We played games, read books, sang songs. We listened to music, did some tummy time, made faces at each other. Anything to STAY AWAKE.
Then, about a half hour before usual bedtime, when she had really just about had it, I plopped her in the cradle. SO. The hypothesis is that she will be so tired that she will NOT stay up crying all night, and that she will even maybe sleep for several hours *in a row*.
What do you think? Any predictions? Will it work? Am I a scientific genious, or just a really really, really mean mom? I probably know what Little One would pick. But she lost her vote last night, somewhere around 3am.

Surprise reinforcement

The other day my dad happened to be in the general vicinity on a business trip. He called to say that he had just a few hours to spare in the evening, and would we mind if he swung by to visit Little One?
...Hmm. Would we?
Would we mind having someone with lots of baby experience, all giddy to hold and coddle Little One, walk in the door like the reincarnation of some martyred saint right at the exact time of night She is set to commence screaming like a banshee?
Would we mind having a grandparent, of all things, coming here and getting all up in our business right as the gun is about to be fired for the kickoff of the nightly Little One Marathon around and around and around and around and around the living room? Right in time for the feeding after which she is most likely to erupt into an emetic Mt. Vesuvius???
Well gosh. I suppose we wouldn't mind, not too terribly, no.
So he came over and we threw Little One at him like a grenade with the pin pulled and then we sat down and had some tea while Little One and her grandpa had some "bonding time". He got paid pretty well in cuddles, but I think it's fair to say he earned them. And I think it's fair to say that none of us, including Little One, minded too much.

Visiting Miss M

Last weekend Little One and I had the honor of visiting Miss M. M is the sweet little girl I looked after before Little One came along, and I have been missing her lots, so we went to introduce two of my fave girls to each other.
M, by the way, is possibly an alien, or one of those AI machines, or maybe just a freak of nature. The child is preternaturally angelic. No, really. She has always slept through the night, eaten veggies, and shared her toys. She is like one big walking pile of sugar, which is why, when M's parent's said "oh, remember how hard things were when M was a baby?" it made me giggle and giggle. That's like saying, "gosh, remember how poor I was back when I only had one billion dollars?"
We had lots of fun on our visit, and M was very sweet patting the baby very carefully, pointing out her elbows and ears, and helping me give her a bottle. Plus we had a tea party.
I would love to show you how, incredibly, M is as cute as she is sweet, but despite my assertions in the previous post I do know M's parents well enough to know that they would almost definitely call out Scotland Yard and take up some pitchforks if I really put their baby girl up on the internet for all the crazies to see. No offense. So I have discreetly edited and left out any pics with defining characteristics visible.
Still, even though you can't see M's cute face, you can probably tell that we had fun. Until, of course, the evening came and Little One's screaming time arrived, at which point we made a hasty escape, because screaming infants in the car are way better than screaming infants in other people's houses.
Though I confess I was tempted, just a little, to stay awhile and let them witness the awesome terror that is the GERD-baby. Just to help M out, you know, get her some of the credit she deserves by having never in her life cried for more than 12 minutes (this is an actual record, by the way). However, as much as I love M, I like her parents too, so it seemed untoward torture them.
Besides, it wouldn't really be fair to Little One. GERD-baby mode is really not at all her fault, and it leaves an unfair impression. Underneath all the screaming and writhing, she's a pile of sugar too. See?

Meet the Fan Club

On a happy note, I decided to post some pics of Little One with some of the folks who I have generously shared bits of Little One fun so far. I didn't do it earlier because I thought to myself, hmm. Maybe everyone wouldn't fully appreciate being plastered up on the World Wide Web without permission.
So I was going to wait until I had asked everyone, but then I thought, you know what? Does that weird metrosexual guy that hooked up with Britney Spears get asked for his permission before his over-gelled hair gets printed in Star magazine? Does that waitress who married Nick Cage get asked? Or that chick that runs around in Bikinis all the time with Lindsay Lohan? NO!
When you hang around with superstars, you have to get used to the paparazzi. So if you have a problem with my unlicensed use of your image, feel free to let me or my People know. We'll see what we can do. But, really, if you want to roll with Little One, you gotta get used to the publicity.

Go Vegan!

If you follow this blog you may have noticed a steady progression, an escalation, shall we say, in Little One's sad faces over time- from happy face to were-baby to colic-baby, to now. Poor little Little One. "Now" means GERD baby. What is the difference between colic-baby and GERD-baby you ask?
Well once I sat on a plane with this woman who told me all about her gall bladder. For THREE HOURS. And I vowed never to become That Lady. Besides which, I don't want to overwhelm you all with big fancy medical words like "esophageal". So I won't go into detail. We'll suffice it to say that it means that rather than general fussiness for unknown reasons, we have miserable screaming for a specific reason.
This reason makes it hurt when Little One swallows, which makes her cry. Those two things make it very hard for Little One to eat. So then she is very hungry, so she screams. Which makes it hurt even more to swallow, and we all play this fun little ring-around-the-rosy till we wear ourselves out. Yay!
As entertaining as this cycle can be, (and, woo hoo, let me tell ya, it can just capture all your attention for hours! Like a good book! Or a comedy show! Or Chinese water torture!) we have opted to attempt to break it. Just to, you know, change things up a little, try new things. Like this 'sleep' thing we hear so much about.
So to do that I get to make "moderate diet changes which may help to alleviate the problem". These "moderate changes" include the excision of the following products from my grocery list:
Eggs, Dairy, Soy, Peanuts. Which means that I am now a vegan. Probably PETA put Little One up to this, come to think of it.
Well even though this means I am mourning the loss of both ice cream and tofurky, Little One does not feel sorry for me. This is because for her part in the "kill the GERD" game plan, she has to take medicine. Little One thinks that this medicine is kind of like dancing on the bar when you're wasted; it's kinda fun once, but after that it's just distasteful.
Lest I sound all whiny and pouty, I will say that between bouts of misery Little One is still smiling and being a trooper, and we are all still having fun. Really! Not even the evil GERD can detract from Little One's adorableness, and besides there are some plus sides to this whole thing.
For example there are extra cuddles. And the hope that things will get better now that we've identified the problem. And the fact that J has taken it upon himself to make me special, fancy, non-soy-or-peanut-laced vegan breakfast, and to snuggle and entertain Little One so I can actually eat it. Which reminds me that, GERD or no, Little One and I are a couple of the luckiest girls on the whole earth.