Staycation

I'm fortunate enough to have a job where I can decide on Monday morning not to come in for the whole week (provided there is coverage in my office).  Since my daycare lady had a sick kid last Monday and I was planning to take Friday off anyway to get ready for our garage sale I decided to just take the whole damn week off. 

V and I hung out with the pregnant and due any day now high school bestie (I may have yelled at her kids, oops), visited my grandma, and spent hours labeling boxes of clothes for our garage sale.  Well, I was labeling.  V was bouncing in her bouncer. 

She napped 2-3 times a day for 1.5-2 hours at a time, cut her second tooth, and was all around smiley and amazing.  Usually spending so much time alone with her would have me itching to come back to work, even just for a few hours to have some time to focus on adult accomplishments.  It's not that I want to get away from her, I just usually have to have a certain ratio of solo baby time to solo mommy time to feel balanced.

Not today.  Today is Monday after over a week home with my baby and I did not want to come back to work.  I've been looking at pictures of her all day and counting the minutes until I can pick her up from daycare.  

I know stay at home mommyhood is not for me, but can't I maybe do like a week a month at home with her and then work the other three weeks?  That should be doable, right?  Ugh.  I hate the inflexible way our society treats mothers.

Babyled Weaning (Solids) Month 1

Before I tell you about BLW, I need to rant a little.  The rant is connected, I promise.

Remember the Great Spending Freeze? Well, it was originally inspired because we had to buy a new dishwasher.  Our old one came with the house and started to smoke one day, so we figured, ok, a major appliance, yet a justifiable expense.  Then the rain just started coming down (hmmm, literally as well as figuratively, thus the flooding and thank god we live on pretty high ground.) 

Before the dishwasher broke, the router broke.  Then, a week later, in the middle of watching Taken 2, the PS3 stopped playing discs.  Games, dvds, blu-rays, all of them.  It won't play them.  Dammit!  That was about 2 weeks ago.  Then last weekend I was getting all ready to strip my diapers and in the middle of an extra rinse cycle, the washer breaks.  The drum stops spinning.  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!  We bought a brand new high efficiency washer and dryer barely three years ago.  I bawled.  Seriously.  I was convinced we only had a 3 year warranty and of course we bought the washer/dryer in May and I just knew we were totally screwed.  Well, fortunately our extended warranty was a 4 year and any repairs/parts/replacements will be covered.  Finally a bit of good news. 

Then, while walking the dogs yesterday the leash splitter breaks so they become difficult for Andy to handle which means we'll have to cut back on dog walking until we can get a new one.  Seriously, our finances are so tight we have to save for a $6 leash splitter.  I want to throw up.  Sorry.  I'm done bitching about money.

 I've been pestering Andy to install the diaper sprayer so we can really get into BLW for the last month and just when he's about to, the washer breaks so since we can't use cloth diapers because we can't wash them the diaper sprayer is no longer a priority and we can get down to some serious solids.

Whew.  I don't think I breathed the entire time I was typing that. 

The first thing we gave V was banana.  In retrospect, it probably wasn't the easiest first food, especially since we didn't employ the handy trick of just cutting away an inch or so of the peel at a time and letting her hold onto the rest of the banana.  It was quite messy, slippery, slimy. 

The proper way to give a baby a banana, IMO.

We also gave her a frozen peach in one of her mesh feeders.  She happened to get a sour one and made the cutest sour food face and kind of jerked her head and arms.  She has since made a similar face when trying eggs and applesauce, so I'm not sure if it's a sour food face or just an unfamiliar food face.

I've also given her several little broccoli "trees".  I figured she would hold onto the stem and munch on the fluffy part but she really digs the stems.  I gave her some potato the other night and she loved it.  She also loved grating her single tooth on a large hunk of green apple.  I've been spoon feeding her applesauce but she helps me and grabs the spoon to put it in her mouth.  I count it as feeding herself and I also credit it with her constipation because it's the only food besides the potato I'm sure she's actually ingested.

Up next are:

avocados
hummus
carrots
peppers
maybe a quartered grape, although they make me nervous
frozen mango chunks
oatmeal something, not sure what
maybe some small bits of chicken
more broccoli because she loves it

Hmmm.  That was a pretty big tree.  I watched closely to make sure "branches" didn't come off.

Depending on the required ingredients, pretty soon I'll start cooking from the BLW cookbook.  I've actually been cooking quite a bit more in the past few weeks since the fast food ban.  Epiphany:  It's not that hard.  I may have been giving my husband a little too much credit for his culinary efforts.

Is She Mine?

Disclaimer:  This is ultimately a meaningless post that is merely disgruntled, not ungrateful.

I understand that, biologically, newborns come out looking like their fathers to establish paternity.  So their dads don't eat them, or whatever.  I get it.  From the second she came out V has been the spitting image of her dad. 

Members of my family, bless them, tried to find similarities where there were not.  "She has your eyes" or "she has your mouth" or my favorite, "she has your coloring!"  Bitches, please.  She looks like a clone of her dad with a teeny vagina.  (Not that her vagina is disproportionately small, but she was a teeny baby.  God, I hope she never reads this blog.)

Andy's family, on the other hand, simply cannot stop gushing about how much she looks like him or his dad or his sisters.  His mom is the worst.  Last weekend she asked me how I felt about V having Andy's sister's nose, like it's a given that she'll inherit it.  (V still has her cute little breastfeeding nose.)  She even claims that the one thing V actually did get from me comes from her.  V has freakishly long fingers and toes, just like her mama.  Or, excuse me, her grandma (whose fingers are quite average length).  Grrr.

Another favorite comment:  "Well, there's no doubt whose baby that is!"  Um, would you have doubted if she came out actually resembling her mother?  Seriously. Although even I have days where I think, Damn, if I hadn't pushed her out myself I wouldn't be sure she was mine, either.

As she gets older I keep hoping I'll look at her one day and see a little of myself, somewhere.  To date, the only thing, and I might be imagining this, is that her left eye squints closed a little more than her right when she smiles.  Mine does, too.  But then I wonder if that's just because my right boob has more milk so she spends more time with her left eye crammed against my right boob than she does her right eye crammed against my left boob.  I'm sure I'm overthinking that one. 

Regardless, she's adorable, my husband is adorable, and she will eventually look like herself with her own gestures and mannerisms. 

And now that she's started solid food there is one thing she definitely inherited from me:  A sluggish digestive tract.  Ah baby constipation.  Mama is so proud. 

The Great Spending Freeze

Much like the national debt, our personal debt has gotten out of control.  I take 75% of the responsibility for this since I'm pretty bad about denying myself things when I want them.  There was a time when I would buy the new release dvds every Tuesday, whether I knew the movie was good or not.  And my credit card balances have become ridiculous.  That was all pre-baby.

Once V was here there was no way I was going to deny myself the pleasure of buying baby things, whether it was something she needed or not, and my credit cards took yet another hit.

6 months later shit has gotten real in our house.  We are living paycheck to paycheck and our appliances keep breaking so we've had to put yet more on credit.  It's to the point where we have just enough to get by and make minimum payments on cards so we are majorly cutting back on spending until our cards are paid off.

Realistically this could take up to 5 years, which is why we're starting now.  V doesn't necessarily need much right now that her grandmas and aunts aren't buying her.  Once she starts going to school and making memories we're going to want to do things with her and take her places and I'll be damned if I teach her bad financial habits by putting everything on credit cards.

Here are a few things we're doing to either decrease spending or increase cash flow:

Decreasing spending:

- No more eating out.  Already this has saved us money.  I'm notoriously bad about telling myself there's nothing to eat in our house and grabbing a burrito or a sandwich at a fast food place, only to come home to half a dozen options that were both healthier and "free."  Since we've stopped eating out I'm pretty sure I've lost a couple pounds.  Not a coincidence.

- No more wasting food.  Andy and I are terrible about eating leftovers and letting fruit and vegetables spoil in the fridge.  I've thrown out so many bunches of shriveled grapes and mushy apples and black bananas it makes me want to vomit.  World hunger and waste is a serious problem and we are terrible offenders.

- We are going to better utilize our local farmer's markets.  Sometimes produce is more expensive but usually it's as cheap as or cheaper than the grocery store and I can really tell a taste difference.  Plus if we buy produce for the week on Saturday from the far mar hopefully we will use it all up in time for the next one the following Saturday.  

- No unnecessary car trips.  Out of the past 3-4 months, only a handful of weekends have been spent at home.  We find ourselves driving 1.5-3 hours, each way, to see V's grandparents and/or aunts and uncles.  Gas is $4/gallon and I drive a RAV-4.  Not economical.  At all.  I say if they want to see her, they can drive their financially sound asses to us!  With the exception of Andy's mom, who isn't mobile and has limited years left to hang out with V.  We'll drive to see her.

- Once the lease is up on the RAV I'm going to downgrade to lower our car payment.  I can probably score something certified pre-owned and cut my car payment down by a hundred bucks.  Andy commutes and drives a Prius that we will own in 4 more years and he'll hopefully be able to drive it for at least 10 more so we have a few years with only 1 or no car payments.

- No more cable once our promotional year is up.  We got cable again last summer in preparation for my 3 months of maternity leave (and to satisfy Andy's Formula 1 habit).  We don't need it, even though I do love my DVR. 

- No more credit cards!  If we don't have the money to pay for something non-essential we will not buy it.  No exceptions!  We have plenty of entertainment at our disposal, both cheap and free, and we don't need more "things".

Increasing cash flow:

- Remember all those dvds I bought?  Our collection is in need of a major purge.  This goes for books and music, too.  Any non-essential dvds/cd/books with no sentimental value will be sold, either at a garage sale, at 1/2 price books or on Craig's List.

- Since V was born, I've discovered the joy of consigning.  I've been taking in her clothes as she grows out of them (as long as they are seasonally appropriate) and we've decided to take it a step further and go through our closets.  Unfortunately the adult consignment store is picky as hell and we don't have many of the brands they take, but we should still be able to make a few bucks. 

- Sell unnecessary furniture and appliances on Craig's List.  We have a few random tables we aren't using and as soon as the book purge is complete we'll probably have a couple extra bookshelves and those are going up immediately on CL.  As is any baby equipment once V outgrows it.  I'd love to give it to friends, but they will need all their stuff before V is done with it and by the time V is done with it they'll have bought it already, so I'm selling it.  I also am looking forward to the day when I can sell all of her diapers.  I'm not looking to potty train her any time soon, but when the time comes it will be glorious.

So that's the plan.  Hopefully it doesn't all go to shit as we start paying things down and having more disposable income.  Anything leftover needs to go into savings since right now, we have none.

In the interest of full disclosure, we both work decent jobs, we both have a shit ton of student loans (like our combined payments are as much as our house payment), and we both don't make the best financial decisions.  I don't even want to think about how much my husband has spent on beer and cigarettes in his lifetime.  And up until 5 years ago he didn't have a retirement fund.  Eek.

I'd like to blame all of this on the demand for instant gratification in an impatient, materialistic society that's always obsessing over the next new thing and focuses too much on status but that would be bullshit.  Chock it up to mistakes in our youth, easy access to credit, and the inability to save and deny ourselves, a.k.a. living beyond our means.  We'll spend the next few years living lean and then hopefully will be at the point where the only debt we have is a house and a car and can finance a family vacation simply by saving for a few months.

One and Done

Unless we win the lottery and can afford to adopt or miraculously conceive while on birth control, V will be an only child.

Part of me thinks this is really sad.  Andy and I both come from big families (I'm the oldest of 6, he's the youngest of 5) and we love our siblings.  But giving V a sibling isn't a good enough reason to have another baby for us.

I'm going to be totally honest here, and please remember, these are my reasons for not having another baby, and, like anything, they are subject to change.

I don't want to TTC anymore.  That two years of trying put a huge strain on many aspects of my life: emotional, financial, marital, etc.  The relief of not having to try anymore is amazing, although abstinence is still the BC method of choice in our house.  (Nookie count since V's birth: 2).

I don't want to be pregnant again.  It seems bizarre to me that something I wanted for so long can be so undesirable to me now, but it is.  I didn't have a difficult pregnancy and weeks 11-34 were quite pleasant.  I just don't want to go through all of that again.  No more morning sickness, no more exhaustion, no more aches, no more food aversions, no more diet restrictions.  It was all worth it and it's a miracle, that's for sure, but the fact that I don't want to do it again doesn't lessen the miracle.

I don't want to give birth again.  I did it once.  It was amazing, life-changing.  And not bad at all.  I would do it again if I had to, but I don't have to and I don't want to.  

I don't want to start over.  The first few weeks with a newborn are challenging.  The adjustment is huge and while pregnancy takes control of your body, a newborn takes control of your life.  I was happy to relinquish that control to V.  And again, I had it pretty easy.  She's always been a pretty good overnight sleeper.  She's napping ok during the day and despite some regression now that she's teething, she's doing ok with sleep overall.

I don't want to breastfeed again.  I think nursing is awesome, and I'm sure I'll shed a few tears when V weans.  Feeding her and getting that oxytocin rush was one of the most amazing parts of her first weeks.  And she's so damn cute when she eats.  But now that I'm back to work I spend at least 45 minutes a day pumping and washing pump parts.  I have to schedule my meetings around pumping or worry about leakage if a meeting runs long.  I've ruined half a dozen shirts with breastmilk stains and have to wear a bra around the clock.  Plus I think nursing plays a big part in my lack of desire to bone.  Foreplay is a big part of the fun, and boobs are big part of the foreplay.  Take away the boobs (because no one is messing with my lactating chest) and a lot of the appeal is gone for me.  I miss it, and honestly can't remember boning just to bone, with the exception of 2nd trimester nookie.

I don't want to do all of the above with a toddler.  If we were to have another baby we would want to get started soon and I can't and don't want to imagine being pregnant, giving birth, and going through the newborn stage with V already in the picture.  My mom did it, many of my friends have done it, and they make it look not only doable, but easy.  I don't even want to try.

Babies aren't cheap.  Kids are even less cheap.  Right now V is only costing us daycare and diaper laundry and we're still living paycheck to paycheck.  Adding another kid to that mix is not feasible.

What does Andy say, you may ask?  Don't worry, I didn't come to this decision on my own.  He only wants one.  While I occasionally say "what if", he never does.  He is starting to feel his age (45) and wants us to concentrate on V and spend the time and money we would spend on another baby on her instead.  He wants to take her places and do things with her that we probably wouldn't be able to do if we had another baby.  I'm completely on board.

Making this decision wasn't easy, but I know it's right for us.  How do I know?  Because if I wanted another baby, none of the above would matter.  I wouldn't care about minor pregnancy discomforts or breastmilk stained shirts or lost sleep.  I would do it all with minimal complaint because it would be what I wanted.

I've been interrogating only children since I was pregnant because I had a feeling V might be a solo child.  For the most part they are happy and well-adjusted adults.  They also had cousins and family friends with kids close in age and didn't feel deprived of playmates, which is something V will have in abundance.  There are babies at every family gathering we attend, whether it's cousin's kids or niece's kids, and hopefully my siblings will eventually have kids she can run around with.

She is exposed to a posse of kids every day at daycare and my provider has a baby a month younger than she is.  She will learn how to share and be social, then will come home to mommy and daddy, who she will only have to share with fur sisters.

There's also a baby boom going on in our group of friends.  We have two friends (high school bestie and Italy bestie) who are both due with boys 3 days apart this summer.  Work bestie had her baby last June and high school bestie's youngest will be 2 in August.  That's 5 kids under 2 by the time summer hits.  Eight kids total, 5 and under.  We've already started planning group family vacations and I can't wait for summers at the lake or the Dells or Six Flags (Worlds of Fun, other random amusement parks) or camping.       

Now that we've made this decision, I'm concentrating on enjoying V.  I know that every stage she goes through will be the only time I'll ever experience that with a baby.  It makes the moments infinitely more precious to me and gives me more patience than I think I'd have otherwise.

I really don't want to start all over and I'm finding a balance between wanting her to stay the way she is and looking forward to her next stage of development.  I'm doing a pretty decent job of living in the moment, although I do have my occasional crying bursts when I cradle her close and tell her she's not allowed to get any older.