What is it with the Mommy Warriors lately??

Geez-o-freakin' Pete. Did something happen on a national/global scale to set off moms and set us at each others' throats that I don't know about? Is it Global PMS Week and nobody told me? Because in the last week I've been verbally assaulted by no less than three separate Mommy Warriors, three distinct conversations on totally unrelated topics that swung into left field without warning, descending to the maturity level of a seventh grade cat-fight before I knew what was happening.  Venomous, hateful things have been said to me this week, assumptions from people who know me only by my internet presence and memories fifteen years into yesterday.

Moms who earn money outside the home. Moms who earn money from home. Moms who care for their children and keep a household running.  Dads in each of the above.  Parents who are blessed enough to have both jobs at home so they can raise their kids together.

We all work, people.

I am the first to admit that I can't do what a lot of earning parents do.  I cannot do your jobs. The challenges and difficulties of the wage-earning world you inhabit are beyond me. There are various reasons for this, but first among them is a physical disability that makes it impossible to be on my feet for more than an hour or so without prescription-level painkillers. That reality already taken me uncomfortably close to dependency issues that I never want to see again. Otherwise, trust me, we would be a two-income household before you could spit.

But my earning parent friends, acquaintances and so on? I'd be willing to bet a year's mortgage money that all y'all couldn't cope with my challenges and difficulties either.  And no, I'm not going to detail my day so that the small-minded may nit-pick and shame and criticize, because they will do so anyway. 

The point I am trying to make is that all parents work, and all parents work HARD.  Whether your job requires a uniform, a tie, a cash register, a desk, a gun, or sneakers and a willingness to play innumerable rounds of peekaboo and repeat "use your signs, not your teeth" on an endless loop, we all work our asses off to do the best we can by our families.

Shockingly, sometimes that includes turning to Uncle Sam for a little help, because in case y'all didn't notice, the bottom fell out of the economy. Not gonna get into those details either, for the same reason as before, but yes, we receive WIC, a small amount of food stamps, and Medicaid. This insures that we do not starve, and can get to a doctor instead of joining the uninsured masses clogging the ERs when someone gets sick.  That's it. No utility help, no housing vouchers, no plasma screens or new cars.  We pay our own bills, and what we have, we take care of and treat with respect, because we can't afford to replace things if they break or wear out prematurely, so our clothes fit well and our car is damage-free and clean.

We garden, fish, and hunt to supplement our budget, and spend precious dollars on a Sam's Club membership so that I can buy supplies twice a year and bake our own bread cheaper than buying it. I live on the computer because I spend my day writing articles and taking surveys to bring in enough to take a bill or two off John's shoulders, all while watching my active toddler in the living room that is set up as a giant playpen so he can roam in relative safety while I work. Once I manage to order a copy of my birth certificate (the fee has proven difficult to hold aside) and get my in-state driver's license, I'll be going to the blood bank twice a week to donate plasma, since it's not close enough to walk without jacking up my ability to move the next day. My evenings after JJ goes to sleep are spent searching for a job I can physically handle, that pays enough to actually make a difference after accounting for childcare. We have a plan, and we're making progress, but it has been about 15 months hard slog, and we're not out of the woods yet. And I defy anyone to step into our lives, with all the complexities and challenges intact, and do better.

The point, I guess, is that I am mortally sure I cannot handle your job, and I'm equally certain that you can't cope with mine. Your world would drive me quite noisily mad, and mine would doubtless send folks screaming into the night. That's why you are you and I am me. We are each where we belong, doing the jobs for which we are best suited, and if that's not always the case, it is up to each of us to change our own realities, not snipe and sneer and cut each other down for not being all the same.

When you catch yourself judging, take a breath, challenge your assumptions, grant that all may not be as it seems, and mind your own business.  And that goes for me too.



Okay, this wasn't at ALL the blogging re-entry I had planned, but... *shrug*

Because that was all kinda heavy and pointed, I close with a photo bomb... :) JJ's getting BIG these days, and cute as ever.  The feet are still huge, the smile still infectious (and now it contains teeth!), and the laughter still entrancing.  Enjoy!

He loves to spin...








This would be why the coffee table is now a toddler-sized window-seat.








The pack & play, otherwise affectionately known as "baby jail".  

He's still fascinated by his own image when I turn on the webcam... *grins wickedly* Oh, the wealth of photographic evidence of his baby cuteness I am accumulating to share with future romantic interests...

Mittens is the newest addition to our family, he was the runt of a litter that was abandoned in our yard last fall.  He and JJ play together constantly, and the giggles are abundant. :)




The Rock'nStack, which he figured out and promptly hid all but two of the rings in fifteen minutes flat. We often dig them out from under the couches, but can never find all 5 at once.

I put these overalls on him for the first time about two weeks ago, and they are OFFICIALLY the cutest darned thing he owns.













This is not a box.

And this one... well, seriously, look at that face!!

We officially have a Toddler.

A toddler who adores making messes and harassing kittens.

*blinks*

When did that happen?????

I was looking at JJ's newborn pictures the other day.  

You know...

These.

 

*sniffle*

Yup.  Looking at those and others and remembering how teeny itty bitty he was... and looking at the twenty-one pound, 28" tall marauder cruising around my living room and wondering how in the heck???

I mean, it's awesome.  Mind-boggling.  But seriously awesome. 

And so, as promised, here is the birthday cuteness.  (Yes, I know it's 8 days later.  Sue me, we were busy!)  And these are just the ones I grabbed with my webcam, folks, there are better pics on the actual camera, but I figured somebody might track me down and strangle me if I made you wait for those!

 The traditional heart-shaped Birthday Cake Pan, here shown 

with evidence that the cake was indeed baked within its confines. 

(No, seriously, my mother has used that pan for birthday cakes 

my ENTIRE LIFE.  I was quite certain that lightning would fall 

from on high if I dared make a plain old rectangle cake.)

"Okay.  I've got a fork.  And a biscuit.  Woopie."

 "Wait just a second... what's that?"

 "Yeah.  I knew Mom wouldn't let me down!"

The traditional singing of the traditional song 

was followed by the traditional destruction of the cake.

"Mmph... Mom... you weren't kidding about this chocolate stuff."

 (Honest, I have pictures on the actual camera while the cake was still 
intact, but I wasn't quick enough to get any with the webcam as well.)

 

 "Yuuuuuuum.  SUGAR!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 The traditional sugar-crazies ensued, and a few hours later...

 

"One..."

 

 "Two..."

"Three... he is DOWN for the COUNT."

He's growing so fast, learning so fast it's almost frightening.  I've always been one who swore up & down that babies are far more intelligent and aware than most grown ups give them credit for, but it takes on a whole new dimension when the baby in question is **yours**.  And it seems to hit a sort of critical mass sometimes where it all balls together, picks up speed, and suddenly every time I turn around he's doing something I've never seen him do before.  Climbing onto a footstool.  Gently petting a kitten (as opposed to whacking it).  Reaching for my hairbrush and using it to awkwardly brush his own hair.  (That one really made my jaw drop!)

The most recent pièce de résistance happened last Friday, just five days after his birthday.  Parents, you know that moment, the times your baby does something that tells you without any shred of doubt that there is a person in there, and that said individual is aware of the stuff you're trying to teach them?  The moment that gives you hope you might have a prayer of raising a civilized, well-mannered little person?  Well, this was a good one.

He signed "milk".  Mind, I have been using "milk" and roughly two dozen other signs with him since birth, mostly as a means to answer that all-important question, "Why are you crying?"  By the time he was three months old, I could run through about a dozen signs, and when I hit the right one, he would stop fussing.  But of course, the goal is to eventually have baby sign back to you, and JJ finally did it!!!!  Independently, without being asked, without my hand over his, and BEFORE he communicated his desire to nurse by yanking down my shirt.  He did this several times over the next hour, very politely coming up to me and signing for "milk", but that first one...

I tell ya, people, I squeee'd like a tween at a Twilight marathon. 

That's my boy... my little explorer... my JJ.

In ten more days...

JJ will be one year old.

*blinks*

Holy Hannah, when did that happen???

Well, I'm doing a quickie post today because exactly one year ago today, I was 40 weeks, officially full term, and feeling like a thoroughly beached whale.  I couldn't walk, I couldn't breathe, and NOTHING fit... and I loved it.


Remember these?

 

Yeah.  I was being silly & John was being indulgent.

And yes, we're going outside today to take more, since it's beautiful and sunny just like last year... if a bit colder!  So be on the lookout on the 25th (or shortly thereafter) for JJ's First Birthday Post, because there will be epic cuteness, y'all.  EPIC, I tell you.

No, I haven't forgotten you...

JJ is 11 months old, active, healthy, happy, and driving me insane.

Haven't strangled him yet, promise!

See?  Here he is looking all dapper & cute as we went out for Halloween.

Best smile I got out of him until we got to church & he could crawl around... he wasn't a fan of the little booties or the hat!




"Mom, I look ridiculous!!!"

"You look adorable, and I want to show you off and take lots of embarrassing baby pictures!"

"MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!"



Anyway... I really do think about the blog.  It's just that most days I don't have the TIME.  If you know me on FB, you see more updates, because FB takes all of thirty seconds.  Posting here takes at least half an hour, and it's tough to find that thirty minutes all in one chunk when I don't have umpteen zillion other things I need to be doing.  There are diapers to wash and boxes to sort through and walks to take and kittens to feed (oh yeah, did I mention I got blessed with a litter of three adorable furbabies about three weeks ago?  No?  I didn't??  Gracious, how shameful!) and every once in a very great while I manage to sneak a shower or some exercise in there.

I'm not dropping the blog, I love it too much.  Posts are just gonna be sparse for a while until things settle out a bit around here.


Oh, and btw...

Halloween when your kid is too young for candy has got to be
the best holiday EVER!  Yes, I kept it to both sides of one street,
and mostly went out just to show him off, but hey, it's chocolate, folks!!

Teething bites...

Pun absolutely intended, so groan away, oh ye of little humor.  That one was for my Xanth fans. :P

Teething bites.  For everyone.  JJ is normally a very happy baby, and even when teething pains strike, he's not usually too much of a grumpy puss during the day.  No... the trouble in this house is at NIGHT.  He fights going to sleep, he wants to nurse for half an hour after dozing off before he will permit me to actually lay him down, then he proceeds to wake up every forty-five minutes to nurse some more.  Then, around one or two in the morning, we get to the REALLY fun part.  That's when he usually decides that nursing is insufficient comfort and spends a good two hours being fully awake and wanting to play.

I usually end up either sobbing or screaming with frustration, because all I want to do at that point sleep.  Especially after John and I spent the day before moving things (large things) around in the garage and carrying boxes downstairs to free up space.  My legs are screaming and my ankles and hips aren't happy either.

In the end, nothing "gentle" persuades him to go back to sleep during these early AM party sessions.  He will lay quietly nursing for hours, with his eyes wide open and staring at me in the dim light that sneaks around the curtains.  When my nipples can't take it anymore, he is equally happy to crawl around on the bed, smacking whatever parts of me he can reach with gleeful abandon.  Hard.   By the time the second hour rolls around, he's already had fresh orajel applied and gotten a dose of baby Tylenol, so by this point I'm usually reduced to softly begging.

Which never works.

What does work (usually, and only towards the end of said second hour) is simply holding the little monkey in a nice cradling cuddle and refusing to let him move from that position.

Baby.  Loses.  His.  Damn.  Mind.

Seriously, you'd think I was dipping the kid in boiling acid or something.  Arching, shrieking (not screaming, SHRIEKING), thrashing, anything to wiggle loose and get me to let him keep playing.  And I have to keep it up for a solid sixty seconds until he stops fighting and is just crying, then it's back to the boob and he usually drops right off to sleep shortly thereafter.

At which point Mommy curls into a little ball and sobs quietly into her pillows because morning is only about 2 hours away.  Singing, nursing, rocking, fresh diaper, orajel, baby tylenol, scalp massage, foot/calf rubs, cuddling, binky, all the standard stuff calms him but nothing works to actually get him to go back to sleep, and I'm out of ideas.  I HATE doing that to him, listening to those enraged, betrayed howls rips my heart out, but it's the only thing that's working lately. 

It's after 8 now, and JJ is still sleeping, because when the alarm went off at 6:30 I just was not ready to face the day.  At all.  My body hurts, I'm  not the least bit hungry even though I know I really should eat, and all I want to do is mainline both of us some Nyquil so he'll sleep for a few more hours and I can greet the afternoon in a saner frame of mind.

But yeah...we have too much to get done today.

Aaaaaaaaand there he is, sleepy little monkey.

Life update, and Four-Legged Babysitters RULE!!

Hullo, folks... I imagine some of you have been wondering what happened to us!   Well, in the grand tradition of life, we got busy, we got stressed, and little things like updating the world on Casa Nolan just sorta fell by the wayside.  Woopsie!

And then last week the "something's gotta give" finally gave.  God came through.  We found someone willing to buy, and sold our gas-guzzling SUV.  We were able to get financing on an '08 Chevy Impala with 20,000 fewer miles on the engine and WAAAY better gas mileage, for a payment we can actually afford.  We put a deposit on the plumbing repair that we've been stalled on for a month, so in a week or so we'll have the ability to take showers instead of bird baths in the sink.  We got caught up on all our bills, paid off the funeral home, and scheduled a move-out at our storage locker for the end of the month.  Our "thanks for choosing AT&T" prepaid Visa finally showed up, two hundred bucks on that sucker.  (Btw, if you sign up w/ AT&T and are looking for your incentive card, be aware that you have to actually go to their rewards center, either online or by phone, and "redeem" the card, which I'm betting most people forget to actually do, which is why they can afford to be so generous.  Sneaky, sneaky.)  

We booked John a hotel room for next Tuesday night so he can go test for a new job that would provide retirement, benefits, medical, long term job security, and a pay rate that would actually allow us to start saving again, and move us into a beautiful area with plenty of hunting and fishing and still have a couple of decent size cities within easy reach.  Oh, and now we have a vehicle that actually makes it cheaper for him to drive there rather than fly.   We set aside money for the bills that hit at the end of the month, and to pay for our old house to have a proper clean-out so it can be ready for the renters our old realtor has available.  We set aside money for a return trip out to the new job site so that when they call and offer John a position (That's right, I said WHEN), we can all drive out and have a good look at where we would actually be living before we commit to the move.  I finally managed to freecycle an old china cabinet that was taking up space & gathering dust in the garage, leading me to hope that I stand a prayer of eliminating the ridiculous amount of extra STUFF this family has acquired over the past decade.  Last week I picked up a music student, so hurrah for putting that music degree to work!  And it looks like I may even be able to pick up a new computer to save me from my elderly and increasingly uncooperative laptop.

So there's the update on our lives in general. 

WHAT ABOUT THE BABY?!?!?! 

Yes, yes, I hear you, no need to shout.  *wink*

JJ is doing awesome. :)  

He's over twenty pounds now, and it's still all length, the boy is TALL, almost twenty-eight inches at his 9 month appointment.  He's been teething with a vengeance lately, and OH the drool, the crankies, the baby drama!!  We're mostly down to one nap these days, and typically 2-3 hours, though occasionally we have a very early morning and the two-nap day resurfaces for a week or so.  He's dropped his morning Zantac entirely, and we're beginning to wean him off the evening dose, though that's proving a bit more difficult, and the one night I actually forgot it was an unpleasant flashback to reflux hell.

Just an aside... the height is something that I intellectually knew, but it didn't really sink in until we were at a family get-together a couple of weeks back and I actually saw him next to another baby!  One of the extended cousins has a daughter twice JJ's age, and when I stood him up next to this actively toddling little girl (JJ can't stand independently yet) I was stunned to realize he was taller than the 18 month old!

And still with the puppy-dog feet!

Speaking of puppy-dogs...

Lady is being absolutely wonderful with JJ.  

I was trying for a different shot entirely... she had laid her head and front paws down across JJ's lap.  When she heard the 3-2-1 beeping from the laptop, she picked up her head, so I didn't quite get the shot I wanted, but it turned out super-cute anyway!  I mean, with the EARS!!!

Last pediatric appointment, I showed his doctor what happened the first time I let him play with a pencil.  I don't have a pic of that one (cuz it's filed away in the bedroom and JJ is asleep!), but suffice it to say she looked at me doing that stunned blinking thing and asked me if I had birthed a mini-Picasso.  LOL.  SO, yesterday I gave JJ crayons for the first time, and this is what he did:

Lighting's not so great, but you get the idea.  

No, seriously, he did that.  

I drew a couple of swirls with the green 

to get him started, but the rest is all JJ!!

He's starting to experiment with standing up on his own too. :)

Reeeeeaaaaaaally wants to move, my little man does.

Now, to finish up today's monster update, I bring you word on my feline babysitter...

Remember this?

And this?

Now we have this.

Just in the last couple of weeks, Minnows has begun to actively help with entertaining and alerting me to JJ's activities.  He's started sitting at the bedroom door meowing, not to be let in (because I'm not in there!), but to let me know that JJ is awake from his nap.  As JJ has gotten more mobile and communicative, Minnows has started purposely entertaining him, by which I mean running into the bedroom when I have to leave JJ in his pack'nplay for a moment, jumping into the pack'nplay to be petted (read: smacked on), or (just saw this one today) deliberately sitting on the bed with his tail JUST BARELY within reach and twitching it to keep JJ's attention while I deal with whatever it was outside the bedroom.  Highly hilarious, extremely cute, and it earns said kitteh much with the luvvins.

Well, that's everything, folks... may our lives continue to go well in the future so that it's not so long between posts again!

A quick moment of cuteness

I got an email from a dear friend recently, a lady whom I respect and miss terribly.  We did the usual catching up, and she mentioned how much she enjoys reading about JJ.  So the next time he did something adorable, I turned on the ol' iSight and...

well...

It pretty much speaks for itself! :)