Only Real Geeks

My trading card
Originally uploaded by lostonpurpose.

Make trading cards with a flickr toy application using pics of their baby.

In other news, I uploaded this picture of the B (not the card itself, the same image I used for it, though) to the thing that Shocho wrote about today that tells you what celebrity you look like.

I couldn't believe it, and was quite dismayed, to see she was matched to freakin' Slobodan Milosevic. What a terrible thing. And for heaven's sake, she got Donald Rumsfeld too. I think I officially quit playing with the application when I saw that.

At Least It Wipes Clean With a Damp Cloth

This product's information page speaks for itself.

Merry late Christmas.

Her First Christmas

It snowed on her first Christmas.

Even though I hate snow, something about that makes me happy.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it. Happy everything else to everyone who celebrates whatever. Let's have a few days where everyone is nice to each other, huh?

We Had a Busy Day

Our young'in had one heck of a day.

First, it was a weekday, but she spent a lot of it with her dad. I think this hopped her up a little bit, especially as I was away upstairs for a bit (I didn't have to rush through my shower!) and then out mailing packages and buying a few last-minute groceries.

Second, she learned something. It is either the tiniest of milestones (seen from the perspective of all the things she will learn in her lifetime) or one very large one (seen from the perspective of everything she's learned so far). See yonder kick 'n' crawl aquarium image? Mine is similar (last year's model that I got on sale, the dangly toys differ and the mat is a different pattern) but you get the idea. Well, after her second evening feeding, she wasn't in a mood to nap. I was going to use the mat to give her what we parents of infants lovingly call "tummy time", so her neck muscles would start to strengthen, but I started her on her back to get her used to playing there.

Well, little missy seemed very interested in the dangly stuff, so I decided to see how interested she was. I borrowed her hand and batted it at the dangly thing just over that hand. I got a reaction (trust me, you don't see such definite reactions in such a small baby often) so I did it again. After a bit of repetition and some rests (can't just keep wrenching the poor kid's arm around) she started flailing a bit on her own.

I thought it was random at first and that she was just excited to be playing, but she was very specifically extending her right hand (the one I'd been playing with) and she was fixing on the mirror toy (the one I'd been batting) and only that toy. I tapped it and said her name a couple of times, then I pushed the mirror and let it swing. B got this very determined look on her face, fixated on the mirror, and then thrust her little arm up toward it. She missed and gave me the scrunchy face, then tried again and just grazed the bottom of it!

I clapped and tried to generally let her know that was a job well done, and she did it about a dozen more times before she got fidgety and I picked her up.

I know it's a little thing, but I taught her something. I showed her, she tried, failed, kept trying, and then did it. Moreover, she realized that I told her she'd done what I taught her correctly, and then she did it again when I prompted her. I think that may have been our first real moment of intellectual connection. She got it. She doesn't know what she got, but she knows I showed it to her and then had fun doing it on her own.

And if anyone out there is going to rain on my parade and tell me that something I showed her and then watched as she did it on her own, then repeated very carefully (she didn't bat at the other toys, nor did she seem to be trying to flail her left arm at all) was a fluke or random baby movement, just take another moment and then don't. I looked into her little excited eyes and watched her lock them on me after she whacked that mirror, and I know what we were doing.

Best. Christmas. Present. Ever.

Third, she's eating like a maniac. She was all restless (which is why I'm still up) and it took me forever to realize she was actually still hungry even after she'd already eaten more than she usually does. I'm glad, because she needs to pack on a pound or two. Unlike her mom, who has to take off twenty of them and that leftover fudge I have downstairs that I made for presents for the neighbors and such isn't helping!

Motorin'

Last night, I drove my car.

That doesn't sound as exciting as it was. You see, I hadn't driven a car before that for nearly three weeks. The last time I'd left the house on my own was December 1st, when I went to get my car's emissions inspection done so I could go to the DMV the next day. In the waiting room, another lady gave me a commiserating look and noted that I looked "ready to pop". As we all know, I did just that the next day and now we have B.

Demerol dictated that I not get behind the wheel for about the next two weeks. And hey, if you're one of those people who just said, "Ooooh, Demerol!" I would remind you that you generally have to be in enough pain to need Demerol before you can (legitimately, anyway) get it, so it wasn't that much of a joy.

I shook off the Demerol as soon as I could without being in too much needless pain, and soon began to dream, in a torn way, of picking up my keys and leaving the house. I mean, it's hard to watch other people do the things you've grown to think of as your job (in the absence of a job outside the home) like the grocery shopping or a drugstore run. On the other hand, it's difficult for me to leave the baby on one floor of the house while I go briefly to a different floor to grab something. When Tom's mom was here, she offered to take the baby downstairs one morning so I could grab a little more sleep (that was the night that she was wide awake in the middle of the night and we had a great time playing, but that didn't get mama much sleep) and even though I really needed a lot more, the best I could do was one half-hearted hour and a half long nap before I followed my offspring downstairs.

I had a momentary impulse to drive the car back into the garage after I'd pulled it out into the street, but I told myself that she was with her father and fine, and that I had a cell phone with me so I could be reached. Plus, we were out of, oh, everything.

So, I did it. I drove, I shopped, I returned, and she was fine. And we have milk, to boot.

Staying Home

You start to look foward to different stuff when you stay home all the time. (Hey, the baby sleeps sometime, and mama has to have something to do.)

Today I was delighted to realize that the Ellen show was in reruns and the first rerun of the week was the episode where they brought out Salt N Pepa to surprise Ellen at the end. If you haven't seen it, one of Ellen's HBO comedy specials shows her rapping the entire first section of Shoop. It's not funny, exactly, although it's not un-funny (considering how disinterested she is in lyrics like "Girls, what's my weakness? Men!")

I couldn't figure out why I was so fascinated at her rendition (I once fast-forwarded through the entire special when it was on our On Demand thingie on our cable system to watch just that one two-minute bit all the way at the end) until it occurred to me what makes it unique. One word: commitment.

Everything is better, more satisfying, more entertaining when there is total commitment. As someone with a degree in performance, I have to say that commitment is often the most difficult part of any kind of presentation.

Plus, how funny is it to watch anyone say, "Lick him like a lollipop should be licked"?

Good lord

I think there's a day when it hits you that you are fully responsible for taking care of a baby. You would think that would happen when the nurse hands her to you for the first time, but I think the human mind is a little more complex than that.

I think the enormity of the responsibility finally sunk in last night, when I couldn't coax her to sleep to save my life. She was only cranky for two brief periods of time. The rest of it, she was just alert and not ready to sleep. I, on the other hand, was REALLY ready to sleep. Maybe the whole thing doesn't hit you until the first time you have to completely reconfigure your own needs because the baby needs something different from you. All she needed was someone to stare at and make her feel safe, and that was the moment I went from being someone's daughter to someone's mother.

Or maybe I'm being melodramatic. It could be the sleep deprivation talking, but she's napping now and I think if I put the laptop down, I should be able to catch up now.

Of course, if she keeps making those little cooing noises, it may have to wait while I stay up to listen to them.

Are you there, God?

This reminds me a little of the MASH episode when Pierce was trying to get an incubator. At some point, they talk to some supply officer who tells them they can't have an incubator, but they can have a pizza oven. I think the line is:

"Just use Form (something) and write in 'Pizza Oven' where it says 'Machine Gun'."

That leads, of course, into this wonderfully entertaining answer on the official USPS website about how to write to some of our cultural figures whose addresses aren't really known. My favorite part is:

Letters to God can be addressed in the same way replacing "Santa Claus" with "God".

So get on those Christmas and Miracle lists now, and try to beat the holiday rush.

Tree!

I suddenly feel so much more Christmassy.

I just couldn't face baby's first Christmas without a tree. My sister-in-law, who is an absolute rock, offered to buy me one while she was out (since I am essentially housebound for the near term) and let me pay her back for it.

She picked out this very lifelike tree, prelit and everything, and brought it by last Thursday. I couldn't have picked out a nicer one if I had been able to go out myself. Tonight, my nieces came by and helped us put it together, and the Christmas season at our house has begun.

I can't tell you how happy I am that I can take a picture of her with our Christmas tree this holiday season. If I can get out of the house to do a little shopping, just imagine the underside of the tree spilling forth with Bri presents underneath.

Limbo

Enough about the baby for now. Let's talk about me.

I am in clothing limbo. Nothing I wore during the pregnancy really fits without being oddly billowy about the tummy, and nothing I wore before the pregnancy, well, zips quite yet.

Yes, I am still going to shrink a bit. Things don't go back to their normal state right away, and I probably have the odd 10 pounds to lose before my pre-pregnancy clothes fit nicely even after everything shrinks back down that's going to shrink down, either on its own or through exercise once I get the okay to do that.

It's odd how many symmetries and parallels there are in this whole deal. Bri is spitting up a fair amount, getting used to eating her new food, just like I spent the first five or six months of the pregnancy throwing up all the time. She used to wake me up from the inside in the middle of the night kicking, and now she wakes me up from the outside to feed or change her. I had to go to my doctor all the time leading up to the day she showed up, now she has to go to her doctor all the time to make sure she's okay.

This is my least favorite one, this having nothing to wear yet again. I ran out of clothes after my stomach got to a certain size on the way up and I spent some time in too-small-for-maternity-clothes, too-big-for-my-clothes limbo. Now I'm back in it on the way down.

I Have the Sweetest Baby Ever

Do you know how freeing that is to say that?

I told myself I wouldn't be one of those parents, bragging about how their kid is clearly the most brilliant, beautiful, wonderful being on the planet. Boy, is that annoying when people do that.

However, if you were here to listen to the noise she's making right now, you'd understand. I'm sorry. She's clearly the sweetest baby ever. She's cried about four minutes in the past twenty-four hours. I realize this could change, but I've been told that the baby's personality and temperment is truly being established in this first week of her life. If she was going to be a cranky baby, she'd be showing signs of crank already. Instead, she coos and clasps her hands against her chest, and cries just long enough for someone to address whatever the problem is and then she clams up.

Sweetest. Baby. Ever. Sorry, I'm also the most annoying parent ever. Be glad I'm not in the same city with most of you to force you to oooh and aaah over pictures of her in my wallet.

You Know What's Crazy?

There is a being on this planet who can be crying one moment, and then stop the next...just because I stroke the hair on her head. Not just anyone stroking her forehead. Me stroking her forehead.

This, of course, doesn't work every time. Nor does she really cry that much, knock on wood. But still. Mind blowing, that something like that would ever be enough to work even once.

Thank goodness all the books say that you "can't spoil a newborn" now. Because I'm not sure either one of us could help it if they didn't.

Guess Who?

Please help us welcome Brigid Lorene, born on December 2, 2005. There's a baby somewhere in that blanket, I promise.

She's home, I'm home, and so is the mister. All three of us are doing really well, though it is a tossup which one of the three of us is the most tired. I think Bri might be just edging out Tom at the moment, but I could come from behind any moment now to take the crown.

Talk to you all later—somehow the internet doesn't seem all that interesting at the moment.