Quick Takes

Here's some up-to-date on the baby and our daily lives, if you're into that sort of thing:

1. My house smells like urine. I smell like urine, my baby smells like urine, her bedroom smells like urine. I'm even smelling phantom urine when the baby and her diapers are nowhere near me. I think it's time to strip her cloth diapers -- by which I mean, completely and thoroughly clean them multiple times in extremely hot water so there's no more weird smell. And that's gotta be the cause for the weird smell, right? Because otherwise we're just the Urine Family that smells like Urine and lives in the Urine House and I don't think I can deal with that.

So, I'ma be stripping some diapers today. It has to be done periodically when you're cloth-diapering, I guess. And I'm just gonna go ahead and assume you're supposed to do it way more often than once every seven months, as per the record in the Wisniewski household.

And speaking of cloth, my enthusiasm for this method of diapering has waned considerably since solids entered the picture. Solid poop is vile and my next kid I'm going to just exclusively breastfeed until he turns three and he can be toilet trained. Even if he gets anemia. Worth it. Solid-food poop is too gross. And every single time I change a diaper, with no exaggeration, I send up a silent, thankful prayer to the baby Jesus that I'm not in the first trimester. Last pregnancy, I puked when I tasted the fishy omega-3 acid in my prenatal vitamins. I cannot imagine what I'd do if there was dookie spraying all over my hands. I'd puke enough to cover the world and never stop.

Imma still keep cloth-diapering, because it's still cheaper than buying disposables every three days.

Good idea.

2. We've stopped nursing at night, for the most part. Last week she was getting up once every hour, I kid you not. Sometimes to eat. Sometimes to just yell at me from her crib. Sometimes because she just wanted to be up. I almost lost my damn mind.

So I beat her severely and went back to bed. Just kidding. But seriously, that's what people hear when I tell them what we really did, which was to let her cry it out for one night in a separate room. I don't know what the eff everyone's deal is, but when I tell people we let her cry it out they're like BUT SCIENCE SAYS NOT TO!!! Dude, Science can come to my house and get up with her six times a night for no reason and then entertain her all day. I refuse to believe that letting her cry for fifteen minutes is going to obliterate her trust in me, like the folks on Peaceful Parenting or Mothering.com would have you believe. Nothing against Attachment Parenting, but if I have to read one more article about how babies in "other cultures" don't cry because they're carried all day/co-slept/exclusively breast-fed/whatever, I'm going to 'splode (the implication, of course, is that mothers who don't do these things are harming their babies, either through willful neglect or through their ignorance). First off, that's racist as shit. African babies cry. Babies in every culture cry because that's what babies do. To say that non-western mothers have some innate, intuitive wisdom that western mothers don't have because of their jobs and dirty, dirty technology -- well, that's just racism. It's classism. It's third-world-fetishism. And I don't play that.

Second, the "science" that these websites are presenting are a little self-serving. I'm sure if you let your baby scream for hours every single night for eight months or something, that would be harmful, and there are some studies about maybe not letting babies cry to that extent, or for needlessly prolonged periods of time. But the folks on Peaceful Parenting (for instance) cherry-pick these scientific findings and tout them as the reason why any good mother would never, ever let her baby cry, even for a minute. EVER! Attending to your child's every whim is the gentle choice. The peaceful choice. The natural choice. Oh, and here's some random study I found to validate my prejudice.

Hippy logic.

Guess what, y'all. I'm not an African Mama and I let my baby cry. And by the way, baby is presently jumping around in her bouncer and giggling at herself. I guess she didn't get the memo that she's supposed to be traumatized and withdrawn. She must not have read the SCIENCE.

(And by the way -- did you know that circumcising your baby will turn him into a murderer? It's true, you guys! Because SCIENCE!)

4. June won't wear a bib anymore when I try to feed her solids. This may seem unimportant, but it's not: Whenever I put one on her, she rips it off and tosses it to the side, and WILL NOT EAT until it's off her body and out of her line of vision. Um, what? I try to put it back on several times before actually trying to feed her, and then I give up and pretend we don't even need a bib, because I'm not sure how to deal with this at all. Clothespins? Super-glue?

This has made me realize how little I know about discipline and how to enforce it. I'm not saying one should discipline a seven-month-old for not wearing a bib, but when she turns two and keeps taking off her pants, I'm going to be at a total loss for what to do.

I don't remember being disciplined very much as a kid. Not because my parents didn't discipline me, but because I'm not sure I knew that willfull defiance was even an option. I have a vivid memory of being in first grade and hearing my teacher tell us "You always have a choice." I put my hand up and was like, "UM, TEACHER? What if someone puts a gun to your head and is like, you DON'T have a choice?" She said, "You still have a choice." And then I think my head exploded. That was a totally novel concept. So then I went home and told my mom I had a CHOICE whether or not to clean my room, and she was like LOL FOREVER. "You don't have a choice," my mom said. "Go clean your room." And I said "okay" and cleaned it.

Basically I'm going to be pretty effed when June starts testing me.

This is probably how I'll respond

5. I'm really fat. Last night I watched my baby's baptism video and all I could think about was how fat I looked, how chubby my face was, how bloated my stomach seemed. I am still fifteen pounds heavier than I was pre-baby, and it definitely shows. It doesn't help that I love candy and sugary things and I seriously WROTE THE DATE ON MY CALENDAR for when I get to go pick up my Girl Scout Cookies. The baby made me fat, but I'm keeping myself that way.

Me, every night. IT'S HEALTHY CUZ CALCIUM YOU GUYS!

Ever since having a baby I've vacillated between desperately wanting to lose weight and being like fuck it, give me another cookie. Last night my husband had the AUDACITY to comment on the number of cookies I was eating (the entire box) and I SNAPPED the cookie tin shut and was like, "I guess I'm just TOO FAT to eat these cookies, then! You think I'm fat?! You want me to moo for you, like a cow?! MOO! MOO!"

I DO WHAT I WANT

But seriously, I want to lose 15 pounds. Apparently I lack something called "follow through," whatever that is.

I'll look it up later.







Have a great weekend!