Sunday, December 4, 2011

Meth, milestones, and public breastfeeding

My husband and I are bona fide hermits, especially on the weekends. Our favorite pastime, second only to drinking beer/eating pizza, is finding new TV to watch on Instant Netflix. We're addicted, and even more so since we've discovered the mind-melting awesome that is Breaking Bad. Every night this week we've stayed up until midnight watching this damn show. And after every episode we kept saying, Just one more. Just one more hit! It's exactly like being addicted to meth. I'd imagine.

So that's pretty much what we've been doing all week. We finally finished the third season on Friday night, which meant we had no idea what to do with ourselves for the rest of the weekend since season 3 is the last season that streams on Netflix right now. Fortunately we have a child that needs to be changed and played with and occasionally fed, so that gave us something to do while we endured Breaking Bad withdrawal and racked our brains for something else to watch.

While we were tweaking like a couple of meth-heads, here's another thing that happened:

Oh hey Bruce Willis, what's up?

The baby is sitting up -- unassisted, for the most part! Four days ago she could hardly balance herself enough to sit upright for longer than a minute or two, and I had to supervise her constantly so she wouldn't fall forward on her face at a moment's notice. That was four days ago. Now she can sit on the floor and play with her toys like a real live little girl. Her favorite thing to do now is to sit in front of a spread of toys and pick them up one by one and lick them, so that's what she did while we found a movie to watch. 

(We ended up going with Bad Teacher, by the way, which was a terrible non-movie that tried entirely too hard. I guess they thought that vulgarity would be funny just for vulgarity's sake, and I'm not really sure why because this isn't Victorian England and hearing a grown woman say the world ballsack has no shock value to it anymore. Plus Cameron Diaz is starting to look like someone's mom, so we didn't really buy into her whole sexed-up, frat-boy persona.)

I still totally look 25, right? RIGHT YOU GUYS?!
We also made a special trip to grandma's house, went to the library, and ate at a new sushi restaurant in our town's business district. I took a picture of the food before I ate it so I can relive the memory anytime I want.

(Oh, and I actually fed the baby in public successfully for probably the first time ever. For the record, I cover up in public when I'm breastfeeding because I don't like strange grown men staring at my fun-bags. I would love one of those Michelle-Duggar style nursing covers, since whenever I try to discreetly feed my baby, she always manages to unlatch at the worst possible moment and reveal my boob to anyone who happens to be looking over at us. And since she has a habit of grunting and screaming if she doesn't get the boob in her mouth fast enough, she pretty much guarantees that everyone in our proximity will be looking over at us. Not cool, baby.

I don't agree, however, that because I'm nursing I should retreat to a dark corner or something. Sometimes that's what I do because that's what makes me comfortable personally, but I'm so over the notion that I'm supposed to remove myself from society completely and feed her in a bathroom or something. And yes, there are people who totally think that's what needs to happen, like the owner of this shop in Dekalb, IL who kicked a nursing mother out of his store because she was breastfeeding, calling it a "disgrace." Seriously. I'm willing to bet this homeboy isn't going to kick someone out of his store who happens to be wearing a low-cut shirt or a push-up bra, but nursing mothers are "obscene" and his "rights" are being infringed on, and God, and the Bible. Makes total sense. I so desperately wish I would have been nursing at the time of this protest so I could have joined these ladies and owned this guy with his non-logic.

And for the record, I have fed June in a bathroom before -- but only because we were in Mass at the time and I'm a total breastfeeding novice. For the first few months of breastfeeding at least there is screaming and crying and finagling and re-arranging and milk squirting everywhere, and I felt like it was just a common courtesy to do that somewhere other than a quiet church. But I still hated it. Feeding a baby next to a toilet is effing disgusting, and I would pray to the baby Jesus that there weren't poo particles floating around infecting my child with E-Coli. My point is that choosing to breastfeed is cost-friendly, emotionally beneficial, nutritious, and it's been proven to reduce the risk of about a million diseases, including SIDS. Mothers need to not be shamed into thinking it's unnatural or deviant or that it's on par with taking a shit.

That's my spiel, as the Jews say.)

Anyway. Right now I just drank a bunch of caffeinated iced tea, so I'm all hopped up and queuing up a bunch of songs on a YouTube playlist (that's what poor people do, instead of buying them off of iTunes). My music playlist right now is wack. I have no discerning palette whatsoever, so I literally just listen to anything that sounds catchy. Right now on my YouTube channel I'm listening to a compilation of the White Stripes, Beyonce, and a bunch of random shit (like this song by Enya). I used to listen to this song all the time when I was five or six. On the weekends I would steal this CD from my mom and blast it in our living room and run around in circles pretending I was a ballerina. As though ballerinas just run around waving their arms in the air and yelling the lyrics to "Orinoco Flow."
LET ME SAIL, LET ME SAIL, LET ME CRASH UPON YOUR SHORE

And that was the weekend.

5 comments:

  1. Ugh I truly HATE the prejudice against nursing in public. Church is the one place I refuse to remove myself, mostly because I have the ultimate argument there. Jesus was breastfed. As for elsewhere.... I pretty much refuse as well. With Mav I always went somewhere. This time around I just don't care.

    Breaking bad is phenomenal! Have you seen raising hope? It's not like epic or anything but its pretty funny!

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  2. Hah, good for you! Yeah I don't understand how people can have a "religious" argument for not breastfeeding. Being discreet about it maybe, but certainly not breastfeeding altogether. WTF? I've always gone somewhere up until now, because it's just so awkward to BF a newborn in public...now that she's older it's a lot quicker and not as much of a chore, you know??

    I need to see Raising Hope btw! I saw like one episode and thought it was funny!

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  3. Thanks for de-lurking in my blog. And what took you do long because now I found your blog which I LOVE!

    I love Breaking Bad. I actually referenced it at my kids' birthday party the other day as to why I didn't want them to open presents in front of everyone, after we said no presents. I'm re-watching season 2 right now because I watched it without my husband and now he's catching up. And then I have a little left of 3. I bet you're jealous!

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  4. There was a woman breastfeeding in the middle of my restaurant the other day during our lunch rush. One of my employees (I can lay claim to them now because I wear the manager button-up, it's all fancy) asked me if she was allowed to do that. I said that if she was willing to carry the kid around in her uterus for nine months, then shove it out of her vagina, she can breastfeed wherever the hell she pleases. Not like she was having a milk squirtgun fight with the table next to her. Had that been the case, I may have asked her to leave.

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