Rasberries

The most prominent new skill of Miss Evie these past few days has been the all mighty and ever shoulder-wetting raspberry. Laugh if you will but this new skill is a big deal to her and she is ever so excited to practice it day and night. The only problem with raspberry fun is that the byproduct is an excessive amount of drool and Genevieve has absolutely no consideration for anyone when it comes to drool. She will happily place it on your shoulder, nose, arm or any other part that should enter into the drool green zone, i.e., within two feet of her head. The most impressive part of the raspberry drool phenomenon are the bubbles…. I had no idea one could make such large bubbles using spit alone! I must admit that part of the reason for my delay in posting was my quest for a “bubble photo” Fortunately Patrick was happy to provide me with a raspberry demo but then in the end I am happy to report I actually got one ☺

In other news I took Evie swimming for the first time last weekend. She really wasn’t a fan at first but warmed up to it OK by the end. The whole floating thing was just a little too creepy for her at first. It was pretty funny, I would let her stand on the bottom of the kiddy pool and then gradually bring her legs out from underneath her and the more she floated the farther out her lower lip went, not to the point of cry but it was definitely displeasure. Well regardless we will have to go again because darn if she didn’t look cute in her swimsuit. (We also will have to go again because being the dodo I am brought my camera but not the data card… hey man I am a new mom I can’t expect to remember it all!)

Working mom

Like any new job or specialty motherhood has its terms of art, intelligible and even counterintuitive, to the uninitiated. The phrase of the week is “sleeps through the night”. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Hey so here I am proud to announce that Evie now “sleeps through the night” hooray! Right? Well not quite. Sleeping through the night in mommyhood speak equals six hours or more. Six hours? What normal human considers that sleeping through the night? OK so the problem here is interpreting sleeps through the night to mean a good night’s sleep. Ahh the trickiness of language ☺ Well so now Genevieve is sleeping six hours at a time and it is definitely at night. Actually I consider myself lucky. She chooses to do her six hours from 9:30ish to 4 am ish. I met with some friends from my pregnancy class this weekend and some of their babies choose to do their sleeping through the night starting at 7pm. (Which at this time of the year it isn’t even dark then so it is a super misnomer then now isn’t it?)

So it is a good thing that Miss Evie is giving me 6 hours at a stretch these days because working two jobs (mommyhood and at ADWR) would be next to impossible otherwise. I had a bit of a rough week because a pending deadline dictated that I needed to work pretty close to 40 hours this week which was much harder (mentally not physically) than I thought it would be. I think really it was the stress combined with the hours that did me in… well that and the first embarrassing, mildly degrading pump on the go experience.

I was at a conference helping out with the AV side things so it was impossible to just slip out and in as needed. It was at this fancy hotel but I didn’t have time (and honestly was just a little bit too embarrassed) to ask for a special room to pump in. So I escaped to a bathroom that fortunately had very few people in it and whipped out my contraption. I squatted on the floor (wearing a suit I wasn’t about to sit) and proceeded to take care of business. I felt like that darn pump was as loud as a jet engine and everyone coming and going must have been curious as to what that bizarre noise from the last stall was. Well that was OK, but then 3 hours later when we had another break everyone, of course, made a b-line to the bathroom. At this point there was no way I was going to hold up a line at the bathroom so I could squat and pump for 10 minutes so I decided (foolishly) that I would just wait until I went home. Ouch what a mistake that was! Ahh the adventures of the working mom….

Cover girl...

What an eventful week! Saturday June 2 in the morning Evie got to meet her Great Aunt Lisa and Great Uncle Bob and second cousins Jessie, Becky and Missy as well as their goats…. Then that afternoon she met her Grandma Monique and Grandpa Gerard. They drove out from Texas to drop off Monique who will play the role of super sitter for the next 6 weeks while I go back to work and Patrick studies for the bar. We spent the weekend hanging out and playing with the baby…

Then on Monday the big day for me came, I went (or in the end tried to) go back to work. I got everything all prepared the night before… being the goober that I am I even made a list so I would not forget anything because really there is sooo much to consider, clothes, wallet, snack, breast pump, towel, because disaster would strike if I forgot anything god knows ☺ and woke up bright and early fed the baby, fed myself and got out the door by 7:40 am I was so proud of myself ☺ I get to work a ready to be as I was pre-baby only to find my computer is totally messed up, all sorts of problems such that I can barely work on it. I do my darndest for a few hours and then take it as a sign that I should just go and work from home as a way to ease the transition for both Evie and I. It turned out to be a stroke of good luck because Evie was having a bit of a rough day on account of the fact she wasn’t 100% used to the rapid eats that she can get from the bottle (baby tummie bubbles are no good I tell ya).

After a bit of a bumpy road on Monday the rest of the week went pretty well. Wednesday Monique and I took her in for her 2 month appointment (which included some shots… not the best way to achieve baby happiness). My mom was looking for some good baby at the doctor’s office pictures to put on the cover of the journal she edits so of course I jumped at the opportunity to potentially have a cover girl for a daughter ☺ Man taking good pictures of babies is harder that I ever imagined!! Well hopefully one or two will be good enough for us to call our babe a model, I’ll keep ya posted on that one.

So here are her current stats: she weighs 11 lbs on the nose and is 22.5 inches long. I can’t believe she has gained over 3 pounds in just two months…. I guess they really do grow up fast ;)

Five years!!

This is a collage I made for Patrick to celebrate our 5th anniversary...

The end of an era

My good friend Annie came by on Friday, my last official work- day of maternity leave, with lunch. As she was leaving I commented on how I had created a massive list of must dos for my last week of “free-time” (ha what a misnomer that is) and had not managed to do really even half of my tasks. She commented that 30% was doing well. This truism got me to thinking about the past two months and how much and somehow at the same time how little I have been able to accomplish.

Since having Evie I have been able to achieve things that I once thought would be so simple yet somehow became gargantuan tasks, such as take a shower every morning, eat breakfast and brush my teeth. Who would have ever imagined (except of course for the experienced mom) that accomplishing such routine tasks could be counted as a major success for the day?! Other not-so-small victories of my first month as a mom have been to get used to my new sleep regimen, squeeze into (a very few) of my pre-pregnancy clothes and the most important of all, learn how/when/where to feed our baby. (And really I should admit that I am still on the novice level of baby feed-dom).

In the end I actually accomplished many of my tasks (really about 55%) because Evie was quite cooperative. She even slept for 5.5 hours one night last week! (Sleep being an important factor in the productivity level of course). In the end, however, I came to realize that all of my said tasks were not nearly as important as the “task” of just enjoying my last week of complete total and utter baby time.

Now onto the next phase of parenthood…