Spare pity?

OK, I know I brought this on myself. I already gave birth to two gassy babies who couldn't sleep in the early morning hours, so when I willfully conceived another child, I was signing up for another spell in the trenches.

But dude. Last night sucked! I eliminated soy from my diet and tried to have Baby C sleep propped on my arm, trying to recreate the conditions in Indiana that somehow resulted in her being much less gassy. But all she did was grunt and squirm and kick me in the ribs. From 9pm last night until 7am this morning.

Do you think I'm exaggerating? DO YOU!?? Well then, smarty pants, you are frikkin' hired to come to my house, particularly in the hopeless hours between 3-6am and hold this child. Fill in that W-2 and calculate your deductions because you are HIRED.

Listen up, people

Those rascals at SUV.com are not going to get Chebbles' notes. But *I* am because *I* was listening... apparently.

Boobies

Why doesn't anyone fess up about the pain of breastfeeding? Well, I did, here on Health.com.

I don't know what you're talking about

My kids don't look ANYTHING alike.

Oma's frog

For as long as I can remember, Oma had this magnetic stuffed frog on her refrigerator. He just lived there, a fixture of the Oma landscape.

When we were sorting through her things, I figured, what the hey, the frog can live with me on MY refrigerator now.

It was not to be. Gigi has discovered the frog and fallen madly in love.

This is the kind of stuff that's getting me all "circle of life." Boo hoo. Smile.

Miracle of Life, anyone?

To my knowledge Chebbles has no access to images such as these.

She just wanted to draw it.

Survived

"...She is survived by four grandchildren..."

Just barely, Oma, just barely.

I returned from the memorial service yesterday and I'd say I'm averaging one weepy session an hour at this point.

It was so WEIRD. That was the word we keep using, my sister and me. Weird. It wasn't right somehow, being in West Lafayette without her. And going through her last belongings? Especially weird.

We had all of her last trinkets and papers laid out on the table in the hotel's hospitality suite, where we spent most of our time together. By the end of the last night, close to midnight, we were down to one mushroom candle and a "World's Greatest Oma" pin. We were besieged by exhaustion and an general inability to think straight.

All of us left things everywhere we went. We lost so many things, left things behind, just stumbling from one event to the next, wondering when Oma was going to show up and straighten us all out.

I was in a hysterical state of gallows humor throughout the trip. I just couldn't stop trying to be funny all the time. As my sister frantically dressed for the memorial service, we were about to run out the hotel room door and I said, "Oh no! We're not supposed to wear BLACK!" and briefly, she believed me and was thrown into a huge state of panic.

I laughed so hard about my cruel joke that Baby C started laughing too. I hope she doesn't inherit my meanness.

In the meantime, my kids have inherited a stuffed cardinal, a magnetic frog, and a set of costume jewelry so "fancy" Chebbles was in thrall with the collection all morning.

They don't seem sad enough. No one seems as sad as me today.

Oma's parents bought her this brown-eyed doll to help her get over her fear of brown eyes.

Oma's brother did become a vet... check out his turtle:

Looking kind of Chebblish at age four...

Saying goodbye to Oma (from the car)

Duh.

What does one WEAR to Oma's memorial service when one need accessible boobs throughout the service? A black caftan of some variety, I suppose. I mean, there is a market for express-mailed nursing/funereal wear, and no one's serving it yet.

I am forgetting everything. Really, as in, "What's that clinking sound behind the car? Oh. I left my keys on the top of the car and THAT's why I couldn't find my keys and I had to go back in the house and find the spare keys and once I reached a certain velocity they flew off the back of the car and now I'm running around in the middle of the road, dodging cars trying to get my real keys off the pavement."

I'm really sad. Really damn sad. I'm making a pathetic packing list, I've forgotten everything. "Oh. Diapers. Yeah."

And my dad asked me if I would put up some photos on kind of a posterboard at the memorial service and I keep forgetting that he asked me to do that. I have some photos of Oma around here somewhere. What? Whatever. Huh? Duh.

The scene here

Despite my best efforts, the floor is once again littered with crayons, barrettes and dried-up flowers Chebbles has brought in from the bushes outside.

Gigi is sitting in her high chair eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and Baby C is in the swing sleeping fitfully, needing her pacifier replaced every 7 minutes or do.

Our counter is piled high with colorful fruit and vegetables I bought at the farmer's market. I'm spending too much money at the farmer's market, I think as I scam some of Gigi's sandwich.

We're listening to a collection of Cole Porter songs because Oma loved them. She felt these songs viscerally, and would sway as she sang and remembered them. Her favorite lyric was from "Night and Day": "Night and Day, under the hide of me..." She loved that idea, that something would be "under the hide of me."

I miss her. I miss her. I miss her.

Getting to Know You

I am enjoying Baby C so much. I get little slices of time with her, just the two of us, particularly after the "big kids" are in bed.

Hub-D observed that he can't get anything but a serious expression from her when he tries to take her picture. It's true, I told him. She's a serious kid. Maybe she'll be the straight man for Gigi.

Her eyes are like blue marbles, searching around my face after she's done nursing. It's such a lovely discovery, the eye contact. She's watching. Tonight I set her up in her bouncy chair in the kitchen and she watched me making dinner, rapt.

She's arriving, this Baby C. She's engaging, getting to know who we are. And Gigi? She's knows Gigi. That's the girl who shoved a "Shredded Spoonful" piece of cereal in Baby C's mouth yesterday, like a communion wafer.

Oma and the Grey Lady

Oma and I talked about her haunting me. Just a brief haunting, we thought, would be ideal.

She has, so far, not made good on the deal, but that's OK. I think it would scare me too much, and I'm feeling pretty fragile right now.

I also wonder if I wouldn't NOTICE if she haunted me in some way. Like, for example, what if she decided to give me a "sign" from beyond by taking a bunch of my children's toys and spreading them out around the family room in some significant pattern? I would never notice.

Ghosts don't seem to fancy me anyway. But Oma was a true ghost MAGNET in her day.

Many years ago, when she went to visit a historical home in Indiana with my Opa, she hung back from the tour group to study the kitchen. It was there she noticed a woman sitting in a chair. Her dress was styled quite differently from the other re-enactors', and she had a strangely sour expression on her face.

She looked directly at Oma, who stood before her, studying her dress and wondering at the different style (she was an ace seamstress). The woman scowled at her very harshly. "GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN," was the impression Oma got from her.

She ran to where Opa was touring the house, and they both went back to peek at this strange unfriendly woman, but she had disappeared.

Oma went back a few years ago, to try to conjure the ghost of the woman again, but they had remodeled the house, and the kitchen area had been moved. So the ghost had apparently moved on.

She and I went on another ghost hunting adventure in Indiana about 10 years ago. We had both read most of the "Haunted Indiana" series, and we settled on Evansville's Grey Lady as our most likely ghost.

This ghost is very active, she's been seen a lot since her first appearance in the 1930's, and she seemed like just the ticket.

It was a bucolic drive down from the Indianapolis Airport, where Oma and I met for our foray into the supernatural. We found a delicious Amish restaurant by the side of the road on our journey to Evansville, and I still remember how she noticed the red cock's comb flowers growing by the entrance to that restaurant. It was also the first time we listened to Tom Lehrer together.

But anyway, the Grey Lady haunts the Willard Library in Evansville.

Once we arrived, we first scoured through the stacks in the upper floors of the library -- it's beautiful, with stained glass and many books covering the history of the region. But it was distinctly unhaunted.

Then Oma had to go to the bathroom, so we took the elevator down to the basement.

First I went into the one-person bathroom. After I was done, she went in.

Not long after she went in, I heard the water in the sink turn on. Then it turned off. It may have done this a few times. She emerged from the bathroom several minutes later, reporting a strange sweet smell, like patchouli, which seemed to kind of explode in the bathroom while she was there. I poked my head in and smelled nothing.

Then we wandered down the hall to the children's room, where we learned from the librarian that the ghost has a habit of TURNING ON THE WATER to make herself known (Oma had been far from the bathroom faucet when the water turned itself on and off). And we also learned that the Grey Lady seemed to wear a kind of old fashioned perfume which would suddenly become noticeable during her "visits." (This is all corroborated in this article.)

Holy crap! Oma had found another ghost! I was so jealous. "Maybe it's because you're older," I said bitterly as we walked slowly out to the car, with me looking in the windows of the library. "And closer to death."

Oma chuckled triumphantly. "Maybe. Maybe."

Oma and her mother, C and me

Oma died

Somehow it seems wrong to say that Oma "passed away" this morning. She wasn't really a person for euphemisms. She died at 5:30am.

She hadn't drunk any water for two days, and after some labored breathing in the middle of the night, she started to breathe just occasionally, light shallow breaths at 5am Indiana time.

I know this because I heard it. Her assistant Brian called me, I was up nursing Baby C so I saw the phone light up and grabbed it. Brian told me that we were in the final minutes, and he let me talk with her one last time.

"It's OK to go, Oma. It's OK to go," I said.

I don't know why that seemed appropriate. I remembered it from a James Herriot story concerning a dog who was not dying despite having been given multiple lethal doses of a sedative. It was only when the owner gave permission to the dog to die did it actually die.

So anyway, it was a dog story, not a grandmother story, but Oma loved James Herriot so there you have it. I gave her permission to go, and told her I would miss her terribly and I love her so much. Then I was finished, and I could hear that intermittent breathing.

I hung up the phone and sat in the dark with Baby C's head propped up on my arm in bed, and I could hear her breathing, her new little lungs pumping her full of life and air. Oma would have liked that parallel. She would have liked to think about those tiny lungs, that lust for life, the peaceful baby.

So Oma's body has finally finished. Where IS Oma now, I wonder? Is she kind of walking the earth for 40 days, as in Bible lore? Will she stroll through my life? As I lay there in the dark, I wondered if I would suddenly feel a pressure on the side of the bed, as if a person were sitting down, or if Oma would appear at the door to my room instead, glowing in my bedroom.

But nothing. I really sense nothing in terms of Oma ghostiness around. It's like she really shuffled off this mortal coil, it's like she's truly gone. And the sun came up, and the sky turned very blue.

I took Gigi on a walk under that sky. She was so excited to be in the stroller, rolling down the road, and I sang her one of Oma's favorite songs, "Alma," by Tom Lehrer.

"What do you know?" I said to the Jeege, with her little curls blowing back in the breeze. "This is what the world looks like after Oma dies."

Then I repeated the end of the song several times:

And that is the story of Alma,
Who knew how to receive and to give.
The body that reached her embalma’
Was one that had known how to live.

Indeed, Oma. Perhaps your life wasn't quite as racy as Alma's, but you packed a lot of living in. A lot of loving and cooking and sewing and chatting and walking and ghost-hunting and marvelous stuff in those 97 years. I'm going to miss the HELL out of you.

Spice Girl

(It was tarragon.)

Transitions

It occurs to me that everyone in our whole house is in an intense state of transition.

Gigi is transitioning from her high chair into a big girl chair at the dinner table. She is perfectly capable of sitting with us, eating her dinner with a fork. It's very cute and she's quite adept at it. The only problem is that when she starts to misbehave (pulling the tablecloth, getting up from the table, etc.) it makes Chebbles laugh. It IS funny, as Gigi is an adept comedienne, so it's hard to fault Chebbles on this, but her laughter fuels the behavior and... I've plunked that toddler back into her high chair for now.

Baby C is transitioning in about a hundred different ways. She can see a lot more, she is smiling at all of us, and she's started really enjoying bathtime.

I called Hub-D into the bathroom so he could see the abject joy on Baby C's face as I bathed her. But when he got there, I think all he could see was his child semi-floating in semi-soapy water, not crying. But I could see it -- she was in heaven. She loved the feeling of moving her limbs under water. (Note: I learned from a postpartum doula to fill the baby tub almost to the top and let them float and soak. "Why not? I think they love it!" She said.)

And after the bath, I was inspired to give her a full body massage with lotion. That girl didn't cry a peep as she settled into her nighttime snooze. Too bad it's not possible to give her the spa treatment every night.

Also, Chebbles' transitions are many. First of all, she can now distinguish between good and bad smells. She gives Hub-D and me regular reports about the state of our breath, as in, "Daddy, your breath smells better this morning than it did last night." Thanks Chebs!

Like every one of Chebbles' developments, it happened overnight. Just as she suddenly slept through the night as a baby, and she suddenly potty trained herself, she can suddenly smell everything.

And she's also ACTING all the world like she's already turned four. She's drawing full-featured people. She is extremely eager to please, in a sweet and helpful way, "Mama, can I help you hang the clothes on the line?"

To that end, both Chebbles and Gigi raced to bring me clothes to hang on the line this morning. The result was various pairs of underwear and washcloths strewn around the yard but the intent was lovely. The great part about Chebbles' new big girl personality is that Gigi is imitating it like that -- so any time I invest in teaching Chebbles to help with a household chore comes back two-fold. Huzzah!

As for Hub-D and me, whoa man, transition city! We're parents of three daughters now, including a newborn. He's working extremely hard to take care of us, and I'm, uh, what am I doing again? It was something... I just had it... OH! I'm staying up half the night with a beautiful little girl who has entered a circus-like house of change and love.

Tired

Well, I admit it. I'm tired. Baby C has been pretty good -- needing to eat between 1.5 and 3 times each night lately, and going back to sleep very well. But once I'm awake, sometimes it's hard to turn off my brain.

I'm completely caved into the swing concept, stopping just short of leaving her in there all night. She loves sleeping in the swing, she's six weeks old for Pete's Sake, and sleeping in the crib or bassinette makes her edgy. So why not! I even cleared it with our pediatrician.

He said, "You know what I say to anyone who says it's not a good idea? POPPYCOCK."

He said "POPPYCOCK" so loud and vociferously, I went straight home and put that kid in the swing.

I mean, "The Baby Whisperer" doesn't know everything.

I said to Hub-D, who was reading a book about longevity and nutrition, that we've got to make sure we listen first and foremost to our own intuition instead of taking one or two books at their word -- when it comes to caring for our children AND our own bodies.

See, if I sat around trying to decide between all the sleep theories -- everything from Ferber to Sears, back through the Baby Whisperer and Babywise -- I'd completely go crazy, and Baby C would be so confused and bereft.

So I look at Chebbles. I slept with her in the bed for the first four months of her life, then we somehow were able to transfer her to her crib rather easily. We did a little occasional "cry it out" stuff, mostly to get rid of the unnecessary 11pm feeding, or when we knew she was tired and just being obstinate. And now? She's ACES. She wakes up in the middle of the night just sometimes, and goes to bed like a dream.

And then look at Gigi (if you DARE), and her sleep routine. The first six months of her life were HELL for both of us. She woke up every two hours. She was extremely recalcitrant with every aspect of her sleep, going so far as to NOT ADJUST even one time zone when we went to Germany last year. "Cry it out" did not work with The Jeege, so we didn't do it. But at six months old, it was like a switch flipped. She started waking up just once a night. And then? She started sleeping all the way through the night.

And the best part of both of my kids is that they happily go to bed at 6pm (Gigi) and 6:45pm (Chebbles) and they stay quiet in their room until 7am. Bedtime takes about 20 seconds for both of them (this is *essential* while caring for Baby C) and they never protest, just go straight to sleep.

So the bottom line is that I don't think I can screw this up. I can put Baby C in a swing. I could do some particular theory of sleep scheduling. I can TRY to mess around with her head and/or her body in some way in order to hasten the sleep-through-the-night process. And maybe it would work. But eventually she'll totally just get it. And she'll learn from her sisters that we don't mess around at bedtime, we just go to sleep.

So whatever. I'm tired. But I'm not falling for anyone's party line. The child sleeps in the swing.

Check it out on Health.com

The final chapter in the exciting story of Baby C's birth is live!

They didn't post the gory pictures (still available via e-mail if you ask, as many of you have!), but otherwise, it's all there.

Enjoy.

This girl's got talent!

If you pay close attention, you'll see Gigi scampering in the background, and hear Baby C's head popping off in the background.

You'll also hear a little riff on "Maybe" from "Annie."

I dreamed about a boat, adrift in the water, having been mostly burned but still floating. There was a bride aboard the boat. Totally alone, with no memory of what had happened.

This is what comes of sleeping next to a 6-week-old baby. And this is just a fraction of the novellas that spell themselves out in my head every night while I drift in and out of sleep. No wonder Stephenie Meyer wrote "Twilight" while raising little kids.

Lucky me, lucky me, look at what I'm drippin' with...

"Little Girls!"

I don't have much time to write these days, as I'm trying to keep the house reasonably neat and go to bed at the same time as Baby C, so I that won't be rattled by her 11pm and 3am wake-ups.

I'm thinking of abusing the swing. Specifically, if I put Baby C in her bed for her naps, she can sometimes wake up 15-25 times, needing her pacifier, or to be re-swaddled, or eschewing general unhappiness before she finally drifts off to sleep. But with the swing? Happy, blissful sleep every time. So why screw with it? It's not like she'll still have to be in the swing when she's 12 years old. And if she does? It fits in the trunk, I'll tote it to sleepovers.

Plus, instead of doing the whole "go to bed in your bassinette" game, where she wakes up and cries two dozen times before finally going to sleep, I can put her to sleep with the swing and a pacifier, then give her a "dream feed" where she barely wakes up at 7pm, THEN transfer her to her bassinette, where she just might drift off to sleep without all the drama.

The only hitch I see with this plan is our planned trip to Illinois in late September. What if she's still addicted to the swing? Well, I'm sure they sell them there.

Pass the D-batteries!

(Note: Yes, I'm using rechargable batteries. In case you thought I'd forgotten my pledge to Pete Seeger.)

Miss Hannigan was right

I sing this song every single day while I peel butterfly stickers off of my skin, sort out My Little Ponies and step on those awful tiny "claw" hairclips.

I love how Carol Burnett just belts it out.

I used to think she was SO MEAN, and now I totally, totally get it.

You knew Gigi loved Ronald Reagan, but seriously, she is SO PATRIOTIC.

Hub-D tried to point out that the crown doesn't really "go" with July 4, since the whole holiday is about thwarting royalty, but she wasn't having any of it.

Oh!

I finally know why I've been feeling so awful in the last few days, why I couldn't rouse myself from the chair, why every single joint in my body -- plus my incision -- ached incessantly.

I have mastitis! Duh.

I called Dr. W.'s office when the aching became terrible yesterday and I started spiking a fever, asking if it could be a side-effect of recovery from my C-section. The nurse was VERY NICE as she guided me toward the more logical conclusion. Hello, boob infection.

So now that I'm on antibiotics, I'm feeling much better, thank you very much.

Of course, and this is how awful I've become, my second thought was, "Oh phew! I was worried I wouldn't have anything to write about for Health.com anymore..."