What's new in Baby World

Since I last updated, things are a-happening in baby world (like you care):

1. June had her first Christmas.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And he lives in a van down by the river. 

I won't lie, we took her to the mall for a Santa photo-op fully expecting she'd be one of those screaming babies on Santa's lap and we'd have a hilarious picture to put in our Christmas cards this year. She's extremely sensitive around anyone who isn't Lou or me (she just now is letting Grandma hold her without instantly screaming), so I thought for sure that sitting on a sketchy, jaundiced mall-Santa would freak her out. It didn't. But whatever, we got a photo for our Christmas card! (And my husband drew our Christmas cards himself, so that made them extra amazing).

Our small family (Lou, June and I) is Catholic, so we celebrate Christmas with an emphasis on Jesus Christ, not presents. At least, that's the goal. It's pretty easy to keep Christmas presents minimal when your baby is six months old and would rather play with the Huggies wipes container than anything else. Regardless, we set a small ($50) limit for gifts and got her this annoying talking soccer ball and a Playskool Purse. I was sort of torn on getting her the purse, actually. I was like, what am I teaching her about gender, by buying this purse? What am I teaching her about what it means to be a female? Why not buy her pretend-books, or a pretend-science kit? And the inclusion of the mirror is troublesome -- am I sending her the right message about character over personal appearance? Why am I buying it for my daughter if I wouldn't buy it for my hypothetical son? But then I saw that it had a tiny set of car keys and a little crinkly dollar, so I got it because that's hilarious.

   Not only does this reinforce gender roles, but that lipstick looks like a dog wiener. 

We also got her a big Sock Monkey, so that my husband and I could live vicariously through her. I always loved the look of a Sock Monkey and I wanted one for myself, but I never had one as a kid for some reason or another. So we bought one for the baby, and she gnaws on it so I consider it a successful purchase. But can someone explain to me what the hell is up with this?:

In case you can't tell from the picture, that's Sock Monkey's big red anus. All sock monkeys have these things, and I never even noticed it until it was time to wrap him up and suddenly his angry red butthole was staring me in the face. So, I'm going to have fun explaining that when she's 3 or 4. How come everyone is up in arms about the Bebe Gloton breastfeeding doll, but nobody seems to care about Sock Monkey's enormous hemorrhoid?

June also attended her first Christmas party, which inevitably lead to #2:

2. Baby's first cold virus.
June caught a cold at the Christmas party from one (or all) of her cousins, and then like the little rhesus monkey in Outbreak, proceeded to spread it to her father and I by sticking her hands directly in our mouths when we weren't paying attention to her.

3. June is learning.
June and I have a new game to play, courtesy of my husband who hung out with her on Saturday morning so I could sleep in. It's called "The Owl Flies and it's Hilarious." True to its name, we have a tiny stuffed owl that came with our baby swing, and I make it fly around June's head and she cackles. She never really cares about the owl unless Lou or I make it fly, and then it's hysterical. This is probably what happens when you're too poor to buy your baby a lot of things.

Right now she's at the age where she's interacting more, laughing more, reaching, exploring, and is generally interested in an array of things, not just Nursing and My Boob and Milk and More Milk. In addition to the owl game, we're playing:

Bumpy or Smooth?
Water is Wet
Puppies are Furry
Hats Go on Heads
This Button Makes A Sound
Where's Mommy? Oh, Behind This Blanket.
This is What Happens When We Don't Nap
If You Bite, Nursing is Over.

She's also sticking her feet in her mouth, laughing whenever her daddy does anything, putting her crinkly dollar up to her ear to hear how it sounds, and leaning forward to give kisses when I pucker up my lips. She's terribly advanced.

(I should probably also add that I am not a natural teacher, I have no idea what I'm doing or if I'm really teaching her anything, and that if she exceeds or meets any kind of developmental standards at all, it has nothing to do with me. Any tips or developmentally-appropriate game suggestions are always welcome. I'm flying by the seat of my pants here, folks.)

4. June is waving. It's like this only way less awesome.

5. June is no longer sleeping through the night.
This one hurts. She was so good at this, for a while. So good, in fact, I started to get cocky when I mentioned it to my pediatrician, like it was some kind of magical power I had that enabled her to sleep through the night, rather than her increasingly-shorter REM cycles and recent foray into solid foods. Last time we were at the doctor I was like, She's so good, she sleeps ALL through the night. I get SO MUCH SLEEP, I don't even know what to do with myself. She sleeps a full twelve hours, sometimes. Aren't I great? 

"I know, I couldn't have done it without her." 

I thought I was pretty awesome for awhile, and then God was like, hey bitch, have some HUMBLE PIE. Now, she wakes at midnight and five and occasionally in-between those hours for a feeding, and I've started taking naps in the middle of the day again.

It tastes pretty bitter at 3 a.m.

Also, my baby of whom I was once so proud, my baby who was once lifting her chest off of the floor during tummy time, has inexplicably regressed. Now she wants nothing to do with tummy time, or with basic motor skills, or with moving any part of her body at all while she's on the floor, in fact. When I lay her down on her stomach she lifts her head for a minute or two, looks around, and then lays her head on the floor, cheek-down, and moans like that lady in the Life Alert commercial until I sit her back up.

Tummy Time in the Wisniewski household. 

And you know the messed up part about this? I feel guilty. Like her being totally lazy as hell is somehow reflective on me as a parent and now she's going to become like this feral child who won't know how to walk until she's twelve and some dog scientist will have to teach her. I seriously feel that in my gut.

So essentially, I'm the most narcissistic mother in the world. Everything my baby does or doesn't do I attribute to my own success or failure, except for her utter adorableness, which I attribute totally to her father. I don't know if every mom does this, or if it's just me, but it's probably not healthy either way.  I need to knock that shit off like now.

And anyway, tummy time hasn't been a total bust. She laid on me during Christmas, and she's starting to like laying on me more and more lately. Don't ask me why. It's nothing I'm doing. Probably.

I like to think of it as one of my Christmas presents.

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.

Sitting up BY HERSELF, yo!

Taken with my crappy webcam...

Can you believe this girl?!

Growing up so dang fast!