The theme of yesterday’s post was “reveal,” but I waited until this one to close that loop. I am not going to yoga on Day Eight. Instead I went back to a second class on the evening of Day Seven.

This does feel like cheating, I admit. But looking at the day, with a wedding at 2:00 and a mother blessing 4-7 p.m., and commitments to my family and my home in the morning, it is just not feasible for me to go to either of the Saturday classes offered. If there were a 6:30 Sunrise Yoga, I’d be there. But 8:30-9:45 is just too late for all we have to pack into the day, including my preparing all the food I will need to eat all day to accommodate my special grain-free, starch-free GAPS diet. My friends and family need a nourished, rested mama, and that is already a little sketchy.

So instead, I went out for a second time on Day Seven to my first evening class at Centered Yoga. It was Yin yoga, a class described by the studio as using passive poses and the breath to create a “sense of balance, harmony and inner peace.” Sign me up!

Even though I was dragging a little all day, and it was so lovely outside I might  have rather taken a walk than spend as much time in the car as in the yoga studio, I knew that I would feel better for having had the meditation and relaxing stretches. And I knew that I would feel almost I wasn’t a cheater if I doubled up on one day but certainly like a failure if I didn’t go on Saturday or Friday night. My husband was going to be home early, so it was the one time I could get to an evening class.

Aside from the yoga, which I’ll get to in a second, one eye-opening part of the experience was seeing what life is like for the hundreds of people who work in Georgetown and live in Virginia. The post-work and Friday night scenes are foreign to me these days. It felt like cultural tourism just to sit on Key Bridge at 6:15 p.m. And then, on the way home, to sit on Canal Road at 8:15 p.m. That was the most exposure I’ve had to over-20/under-30 humanity and to external combustion I’ve had in a long time. Witnessing it — while listening to classical music — was an exercise in anti-narcissism. It’s important to be reminded that your own individual issues are not being obsessed over by everyone else in the world.

But I’m avoiding talk of the class, I see.

Early on, the teacher invited us to dial back our intellect and to “turn up the volume” on our intuition. She said a lot of provocative things, and sometimes the music helped me get out of my head and let her words take me to their essence.

The first time she said, “Our hips tell our stories” — that they reveal a lifetime — I could only think of boys and things you do with them in the dark. But on the second side in pigeon pose, I thought of giving birth to my daughter, 10 months ago yesterday.

In the birth pool, I had my left knee down and my right knee bent, up and perpendicular to the ground. My labor was short — just 4.5 hours from the pop of my water when I went up into bridge pose at 5:30 a.m. to her birth at 10:08 a.m. — but I was pushing for too long. I’d been unpracticed in the art of breathing through intensity; as soon as it came, I wanted to match it. But three hours later, I was tired and the midwife’s tone got just a touch stern after my daughter’s head was out that the rest needed to come along, too. No longer feeling the inevitability of the next contraction, I had to finish on my own, and quickly.

And when I did, I was cautioned not to pull the baby too high out of the water because of her short cord. My son’s cord was so short, he’d been breech and delivered via c-section. I’m not exactly a fan of short cords. I got a little freaked out.

Then I remarked that, while my surgically-delivered baby’s head looked quite intact and non-smooshed, and this baby’s did not. It looked funny, her eyes and ears seemingly set wide apart. She also didn’t cry right away. I didn’t know what to make of this near-flaccid baby who looked rather like Gollum. My first thought was a worry that she might have Down Syndrome and that I would not know how to be a good mother to her. I worried I wouldn’t love her enough, that my heart was not big enough to envelop this being I’d spent nine months worrying about and loving and feeling move inside me. What would this reveal to me about me if I stopped short of adoration?

We can never know who are children are, but it is striking to me how much with both I just looked at them in wonder. And with my daughter, I had a nervous first two minutes wondering if anything had gone wrong, chromosomally or otherwise. Here I’d had my successful homebirth in barely enough time for my midwife to make it to my house and relieve her backup. But what would happen now? Who were we all going to be?

In yoga class, I felt my hips expand in pigeon pose and thought about my story. The teacher told us, before folding, to expose our hearts, and I found that sob at was hiding on Day Four. And I cried. Mostly it was in my body, but some tears fell on my block, the floor, my cheeks.

I hope the teacher wasn’t concerned if she noticed. It was an important release.

I came home wanting to embrace my baby and her father. They are precious.

And yet, life is not just a Lifetime movie. The baby would not go to sleep. When I pulled her off my breast, she writhed like I was sticking her with a hot poker. I gave her homeopathy, Rescue Remedy, an herbal calming tincture. My husband tried again to get her to sleep. Finally I put her on my back, did some watercolor painting for the motherblessing books, and there she lies, her neck cocked over in a way that probably feels as uncomfortable as the extra 20 pounds feels to my back while I sit with horrible posture.

But it’s what is working right now. I don’t want to challenge it. Sometimes you just have to go with that and have faith that things will all work out as they are meant to be.

Right?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

At least I got in some lactivism this weekend!

It has been a long string of days with a dramatic, exuberant, clingy, whiny and non-stop-talking almost-five-year-old and a not-much-sleeping, perennially-teething (but happy!) six-month old. So I will save the full report on yesterday’s nurse-in at the Hirshhorn Museum for another time (will link if it gets posted elsewhere) and at least just say this: it was great!

Me with my "Birthing, breastfeeding, beautiful feminist" (FeministBreeder.com fan gear) bag (and Holistic Moms t-shirt) and my baby in the Beco at the Hirshhorn nurse-in

Congratulations to LJ Pelham for putting together such wonderful event! It was so heartwarming to see so many moms, dads, babies and kids all happily nursing, talking, and playing. The vibe was totally positive, and the staff of the museum could not have been more supportive. So many more folks now know their rights to nurse in public as a result of this great event.

See background on it here, and check back for my longer, more detailed post or a link to it, and more photos.

I didn’t even know what the term lymphedema meant when Susan Niebur of Toddler Planet blog told me she was working out a deal to have compression sleeves made available to women who can’t afford them. I hadn’t ever met Susan, but I knew she was in a rough place with a recurrence of cancer; we both used to write for DC Metro Moms and will soon be writing for The DC Moms.

Despite everything else she has going on, Susan replied quickly to my inquiry if a visit from a woman she’d never met (even one with a cute baby!) would be welcome. I offered referrals to holistic folks, and she wrote back about having gotten relief with lymphedma therapy at an integrative medical center I’ve been to. Some quick Googling told me that removal of lymph nodes can result in painful swelling, which can be mitigated by sleeves or compression devices.

Susan shared that she, too, was an attachment parenting mama, and that I should save my new-mama energy rather than come to her side of the Beltway. But she asked for my help in spreading the word about the new partnership she was going to launch the next day, and I promised I would.

And then my son got sick. And then his dad got sick. And, already not knowing which way is up as a newish mom of two, I lost my way.

I knew I would eventually get a post up, but I didn’t know that cancer would first hit home, giving me a whole new perspective on Susan’s experience and on her important project to give women access to lymphedema sleeves (which are not covered by insurance).

Liz strings a bead on my labor necklace at my motherblessing

I found out yesterday that my friend Liz has breast cancer, invasive ductal carcinoma, and that it’s said to be “aggressive.” She’s 42 and has three daughters who are 21, 9, and 5, and a baby boy who is almost 10 months old. She’s been an extended breastfeeding advocate for a long time, so it’s breaking her heart to think about weaning him as almost as it’s scaring her to think about her future.

Liz quickly became a mentor of sorts to a playgroup we formed together over four years after “meeting” through an Attachment Parenting email list. The other people in the playgroup connected over their interest in and advocacy of homebirth. Liz helped build the Northern Virginia Homebirth Community resource. Her license plate is H20Birth. Being around Liz helped pave the way for my homebirth this past August after my 2006 c-section.

Despite my emotional turbulence during my pregnancy, Liz stuck by me and helped organize a wonderful motherblessing. A week before my daughter was born, that special afternoon helped me float into the reality of birthing my baby in my home. Speaking of floating, Liz also arranged for me to rent the same birth tub her son was born in, and she even picked it up and brought it to my house!

The day I had my baby, she was over within hours. Unfortunately, she was faster than my placenta, which took 4.5 hours to be delivered (about exactly as long as my labor was for the baby). Since my neighbor was also in labor (and had hired the same midwife), Liz, once a midwife in training, went down to the other woman’s house to help out as an assistant so that the actual assistant could go with me to the hospital. When I ended up expelling the placenta on my own, it was Liz who was directed to call the hospital and tell them I would not be coming.

Even though she had her own 4-month-old and two elementary-aged girls, Liz picked up my son several times this

Liz paints my belly at my motherblessing

summer to take him on playdates. How she mustered the energy to brave the splashground with all those children I’ll never understand!

But she did. And now we know that the lump she felt that month was more than nothing. A biopsy last week revealed the bad news, and now she awaits an MRI for more information about the extent of the cancer and her possible treatment options.

I have not been the greatest friend to Liz or to our mutual friends. I haven’t shown up for her or others when they’ve had their babies in the way I wish I could have, especially now that I have been on the other end and know how much help helps, and how much silence can hurt. I still need to do some work on myself to figure out the roles I have and haven’t played, and to forgive myself and move on.

But now, there is no “getting to it later.” There is no assuming she let me know if she wants something. She needs help now. And she has no health insurance. Her family is applying for Medicaid, but there is not much in the coffers, and any treatment — holistic or conventional — is going to cost a whole lot, upwards of $20,000 another friend’s research found.

So I started a blog at http://helptohealmama.blogspot.com/ to enlist some help. Another friend got PayPal set up for donations. Please make one if you are reading this and can spare even $10. A lot of smalls can add up to something big!

I hope we can eventually get a system of healing service donations going so that Liz can get massage, acupuncture, detox treatments, nutritional consults, Reiki … whatever people will offer pro bono.

If it’s determined that Liz will need to be aggressive with her treatment in a mainstream way, she will need breastmilk donations for her baby. At some point, she will need help with meals and with childcare, so I’ve set up a Lotsa Helping Hands website.

After all the support and love Liz has given me and the difference she’s made in the lives of so many women, the least I can do is to help create a network of help. Maybe all the time I’ve spent cultivating relationships with healing professionals can in some way benefit her and her family.

Added later:

More on blogging power for moms fighting breast cancer at She Posts and at Mamma Loves, where you’ll get the story behind this icon:

On the night my daughter turns just four months old, why did I just spend 15 minutes to pump three ounces of breastmilk?

On one hand, I know this is a full month later than most working moms have already gone back to the office. By now, they are pros, with freezers stocked with milk and confidence. Well, maybe not, but at least they are fairly set in what they are doing.

On the other hand, many folks in the attachment parenting world (including an earlier version of me) would be aghast at my choice to leave my daughter unnecessarily at such a young age.

You can focus on all the branches at once...

...or just on the big ones.

So why am I doing it?

Reasons for using a babysitter:

Specifically, tomorrow is my son’s schools Advent Garden, and I want to give it — and him — my full attention. I want to be just his mom in an experience that is just his, not something shared by a baby who could cry or demand my boob at any moment. Or just get everyone’s oohs and ahs. I mean, he loves her, and I think he gets a kick out of being big brother, but this is his experience.  It is such a beautiful, reverent time, I want him to be fully present and not stifling — to more likely succumbing to — the urge to tweak his sister’s ears, pet her face, stick his hands under her onesie, or touch his nose to hers.

Generally, I kind of want him to see me as available to him as an individual and not just home all day with the girl while he’s at school. It seems like to not have some other person in his sister’s life, I’m conveying the message that her needs are more important than his or than mine. They are in a lot of ways when she’s so little, but he and I are still people; we’re not erased because she’s now in our lives.

But really, Jessica, beyond this day, why are you considering leaving your daughter (next month) for a full day once a week with a stranger?

Thanks for asking, Other Self.

Well, see, now first of all, she’s not a stranger. She’s a Holistic Mom and someone who has worked at my son’s school. She knows a whole lot more about Waldorf education and raising children than I do. I expect I could stand to learn a lot from her. I’m already rethinking bedtime routine for my son based on our first conversation about childcare.

And another reason why: because I didn’t with my son, and it was, as the kids say, ruff. From seven to seventeen months, he could hardly stand to leave my side. Sure, I do think his high level of comfort now is due in part to the fact that we didn’t push it with him. But I also know how hard it was on me to not be able to tend to my own health needs. I’ve always said if I had another child, I’d want her to know and be comfortable with a few different people before she hit that stage. And with no family in town or doting single friends, that means childcare providers.

Another reason is that, as long as I am going to be a person who takes on responsibilities and has a lot of interests — which is to say, as long as I am true to myself — I think it’s only fair to do what I can to honor my daughter’s needs and rhythms. If she’s in one place all day, she won’t be running errands with me when she’d rather be asleep. She will have 30 fewer minutes in the car and can just settle into one place. If I also get someone to come over to the house, that will let her nap undisturbed at home like she did on Tuesday when my husband drove my son to school.

Let’s face it: I’m not cut out to be a homeschooling mom or to be a mom who doesn’t volunteer or take on various types of work. But I would like to do a little more compartmentalizing and less multitasking. I’d like to just juggle mom/homemaker stuff when my kids are around instead of also feeling like I have to check my email so often or daydream about what I’d be writing if I had more time.

I realize that there will never be “enough” time, but I’m hoping that with some strategic childcare, maybe I can be more focused and feel more fulfilled in how I use my time. I think that would make me a happier person and a better mom and model. Seeing my son literally drop one thing to pursue another doesn’t exactly have me welling up with pride.

I might be singing a different tune tomorrow. Maybe she won’t sleep at all, or she’ll be like my friend’s son and completely refuse a bottle. (How can he not eat all day long?!)

Maybe she’ll disabuse us of the notion that she’s so much more chill than her brother was. Maybe I’ll be writing tomorrow night about how guilty I feel. There was certainly already a twinge of the G-word as I packed the different types of nipples into the bag with extra diapers and clothes.

But I have to give it a shot. I’ll be on call, just spending the first two hours at a coffeeshop and being available to nurse her before I actually have to show up at the school.

I have to admit, though, that I’m hoping I walk away from the morning feeling like the world will not come to an end and the AP officials will not come take away my free toaster oven if, after the new year, I start using childcare even though I don’t have a job.

I’m hoping that if this time around, I just move with confidence instead of guilt and, if I actually hold in my head and heart the belief that everything will be okay, it will be.

How do you figure out what is right, and when?

I go away for one weekend to introduce my baby to her grandmother, and the internet explodes with responses to author Erica Jong’s diatribe against attachment parenting in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

I mostly appreciate the comments of Madeleine Holler on Babble’s Strollerderby in response to Jong’s piece. But a few things strike me as ideas I should get off my chest before I go to bed (unless my daughter wakes because, you know, I actually think it sucks to be hungry, and if I want a snack before bed, I get one, so why shouldn’t she?)

I’m bothered by the whole idea that the Attachment Parenting (AP) lifestyle keeps people from real engagement with politics. I can see how focusing on a new life keeps you a little out of the loop for a while; so does cramming for exams, or getting entrenched in anything intense for a period of time. But why does Jong have to talk about choices like cloth diapering and making baby food as just something that makes moms feel guilty? For me, these are political and engaged-with-the-world acts.

Me wearing my baby and talking about a health concern - high fructose corn syrup - on CNN. Am I a slave to the AP police or someone so focused on my precious baby that I can't engage in the real world?

I don’t accept that baby food — or even that much adult food — has to come from some mass-produced factory if I have the capability to make it myself with ingredients from farmers whose practices I consider responsible and healthful. Not everyone has the time and money, but if I do, am I supposed to not support sustainable agriculture because my doing so — or my sharing information about doing so — makes other moms feel bad about themselves?

Not everyone loves breastfeeding, but I’m not supposed to be passionate about something I think is a healthy and ecologically sound choice because other people will feel judged? Is it also shitty of me to be proud that my kick-ass woman’s body has made up every stitch of my daughter’s fiber since she arrived three months ago?

And the diaper issue. I don’t think it’s sustainable to toss a ton of trash into landfills because it takes less time than washing diapers. So I don’t do that unless there’s a reason, and then I just own my decision. I also don’t throw trash into the street or buy a lot of stuff that has a lot of waste associated with it. Can’t those be considered acts that have me thinking about the world outside my home instead of something that has me in a prison? What counts as engagement with the political process for Jong?

She says I must not have “time to question and change the world” that my children and I inhabit, but that’s exactly what I’m doing with my choices. It’s not that “anything less is bad for baby,” as though all I care about is looking good for a 12-pound princess. It’s that I’m making choices that I feel good about, for myself, for my environment, and for my children in the examples I want them to see. Thinking about the future I want my children to both inhabit and to help create makes me more engaged, more concerned. And probably more healthy.

It’s always interesting to imagine what gets a writer so angry that she makes sweeping statements and pronouncements like this. I feel like if you have this much venom in you, then you need a lot more help than you need the notoriety of igniting an internet debate. But if that’s what you have access to, maybe it’s a good substitute for working out your demons.

I had the impression that Jong was complaining about AP as though it was part of the “motherphilia” of the last two decades, a relatively recent phenomenon that includes us eco-crusaders. And yet, she admits to feeling guilty for her “imperfect attachment” when she left her now-grown daughter with nannies to go out on book tours and other travel. Is she implying that the AP police were already in force then? Or is it possible that maybe it’s natural to feel kind of off if you bail on your kid at an early age? Or that maybe guilt is a self-imposed emotion of people who are not committed to their choices rather than a product of the Sears family AP empire?

I’m glad Jong’s daughter, in her response, doesn’t seem bitter toward her mom, but I also don’t agree that her mom made the daughter’s choices possible. It’s great that Molly Jong-Fast can stay home if she wants (and write!), but her mom didn’t make it so women can work and breastfeed easily and without having to fight for a place at the pump. Her mom’s actions didn’t contribute to a positive attitude toward mothers.

I do like that Jong almost sounds like she respected her young daughter’s needs in not schlepping her hither and yon when Jong was committed to travel. Still, it sounds to me more like she feels guilty for wanting to be away than anything else. And who made her feel that way back in the late 1970s?

Jong’s piece sounds to me decidedly anti-woman, anti-mother, and anti-feminist, as though if you’re not letting other people help you raise your kid or you’re not doing everything with your own convenience foremost in mind, you’re trapped — and judgmental at the same time. What a narrow place to be.

My nursing daughter

As I type this Blog Action Day post, my two-month-old daughter is nursing. It’s very clear to me that whatever I put in my body is literally helping to build hers. Ever since I read in Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood about breast milk being contaminated with persistent organic pollutants, I’ve had a whole new understanding of the relationship between the planet and our bodies.

I have been off the bottled water train for a good while now, but after last night’s Holistic Moms meeting with speaker Diane MacEachern of The Big Green Purse, I’m even more committed. Diane explained that it takes two gallons of water to produce every gallon of bottled water. She also noted that for a time, Fiji residents did not have enough water because it was being over-harvested, so to speak, to bottle to send elsewhere. And she noted that many studies are finding that bottled water is no different from tap water.

One of the reasons I stopped drinking bottled water was to avoid the chemicals that can leach from the plastic.  BPA can act as a xenoestrogen, and when I was struggling with infertility due to estrogen dominance, I wanted to get chemicals and endocrine disruptors out of my body, so I gave up the bottled water,and the more I learned, I also cleared out my cabinet of skin care products that contain these harmful substance and then end up in our water system.

Right now I’m using metal bottles purchased at My Organic Market and reuseit.com (formerly ResuableBags.com), but I may look to switch to glass bottles, which are now available at reuseit.com and even at Amazon.com (Despite the negative effect of its bigness on smaller businesses, one good thing about Amazon is that you can get a lot of stuff from one central place shipped right to your door instead of getting a bunch of stuff from a bunch of different places, which takes more time and gas.)

In our house, we have a Doulton under-the-counter filter (purchased from Radiant Life) with a special chamber that is supposed to remove fluoride, which has been linked to numerous health problems and is not necessary for healthy teeth. I’m so grateful that my parents did not have me participate in fluoride treatments at my elementary school when we lived in a rural area with well water. I did not have a single cavity before my twenties. I don’t use toothpaste with fluoride, and neither does my dentist, who links to this whole fluoride bibliography on his website. I haven’t had any cavities for over ten years (and even those I’m dubious of being real).

Someday, I might invest in a whole house filtration system so that all of our water would be free of fluoride and also chlorine. We have filters on our showerheads, but not on our faucets (or on our garden hoses, or for our laundry).

I appreciate the many groups and individuals working on issues of water safety and hope everyone will pay attention to what goes in — and on — our bodies.

Professional photos are not something I’ve pursued for my family. It took me over a year to redeem a free shoot I won from Holistic Moms Northern Virginia chapter’s one-year anniversary party for pregnant belly shots.

When I connected online just a week later with DC-area newcomer Lisa Hager of Red Thread Photography, I was intrigued by her August campaign to donate 100% of August’s income to CARE, an organization that works to fight global poverty with a special focus on helping women and girls.

We never did a newborn photo shoot with my son, but I decided his sister should get one (and we were way overdue on family photos, too). Lisa came over when my daughter was almost 4 weeks old and did an amazing job corralling my clueless family — between bouts of crying or preschooler drama — into so many lovely shots we had a terrible time deciding what images to buy! Seriously, it has taken weeks!

I don’t post full-on child faces on my blog (especially when they are so crystal clear!), so here are photos of me and the babe. I was surprised to find myself hesitating to post the more obvious nursing shot considering how much lactivism I did with my son, who nursed until age three.

This isn’t too much breast for prime time, is it?  How can the most loving, healthful act be anything but beautiful? Especially in this photographer’s hands!

Thanks, Lisa, for capturing such wonderful images! Now that I have them, I guess there’s no excuse for putting off that birth announcement. Have I mentioned my daughter is now 8 weeks old?

Bless me, Earth Mother, for I have sinned.

To cut to the chase, I drove a full 22 minutes on a perfectly gorgeous sunny autumn day to buy a bucket of plastic toys. Virgin plastic. $29.99. Lots of petroleum. Bad precedent. I know, it’s not pretty.

So why did I fall so hard? It’s complicated. It starts with the grunts of a baby that had me more actively parenting in the night than I’d like, such that I then ended up sleeping until 9 a.m. Wow, that is late. By the time baby girl and I emerged, waffles had been made, and when it was time for my husband to take our son to a birthday party 90 minutes later, it became clear that the poor child had had essentially no protein in the three and a half hours he‘d been awake. No wonder he was copping an adolescent-sized whinefest about riding in his baby sister’s stroller instead of biking, walking or scootering the 3 and a half blocks to the party. We stuffed him full of nuts and goat cheese, but I claim the damage had already been done. Like mother, like son: a day that starts with carbs is not one with a storybook ending. Unless your storybook has the name Grimm on the spine.

Hubby left the party shortly after we arrived (boy on bike, baby in sling) so that he could do his one fun/sporting activity of the week. So I was left solo with the two kids. Usually the mom who brings an entire meal to a party for her gluten-free son, this time all I had prepped was a trio of Enjoy Life allergen-free snickerdoodle cookies that I bought on sale hoping I would get a chance to bake and wouldn’t need them. Fat chance.

What a surprise when I heard the host say something about lunch. Did I even read the Evite, I wondered? I had assumed we’d be back home for lunch after just some snacks and cake. Wrong! Lunch was sandwiches and pasta salad. The host kindly gave me access to some lunchmeat (not Applegate or Wellshire, so I gave him just one slice) and a big chunk of cheese off of which I cut several slices then and again when he asked for more. What a great guest I am. He also ate a lot of grapes and some veggie chips (which I hoped were not the kind that contains wheat flour) and even handed me a stray goldfish that made its way onto his plate, bless his heart. And he ate it all without complaint from a rocking chair on the floor because the big table was full.

Then came the cake — an impeccable purple castle. My son knows other people’s cakes are not his destiny, so it was no surprise or disappointment that he’d be denied a turret or graham cracker-covered door. But I still wondered how he’d react to the unfamiliar cookies. He ate one and half of the three I’d placed in a plastic container with a prune. Please do note: he ate the prune first. So clearly, all hope is not lost on us. (Oh, and he specifically asked after the cookies for water, not for more of the watered down juice I’d given him with lunch.)

But when he started to lose it when some toddlers toddled over his duplo block creation, I knew we had to make a hasty exit. He was fully in tears, and no suggestions would appease him. Someone asked if I wanted her to hold the baby. At first, I balked, and then I handed her over to scoop up my son from the puddle he’d become. My shoulder had been getting tired from the sling, but let me tell you, 40 pounds feels different than nine. “I can hold her while you get him out to the car,” the helpful arms offered. “Oh, there’s no car,” I said, basking in self-pity.

The prospect of getting my tired, not-well-fed kiddo to ride his trike or even walk all the way home while I had a baby dangling off my front and black diaper bag on my back was, well daunting. So I approached the situation first with empathy, and then with what some might crassly call a bribe. Whatever the name, it worked. “I know you’re upset. We can get you some Legos of your own sometime maybe later this weekend. I need you to come home with me now. The party is over anyway.”

We have no toys like this, and he loves them, so I was willing to make good on my promise if he forced the issue. I would have rather lasted until I could get to a consignment sale or put something out on a mom’s list as an ISO item. But then the rest of the day happened. The baby woke up as soon as we got home. And she wasn’t the only one who needed to eat; I was hungry, too. A late breakfast will only get a nursing mom so far.

After the girls had a few rounds of eating and nursing, the preschooler started to get restless and the baby was tired and too pissed to poop out. A request to “watch something” was made as were several comments about Legos. We had to do something if I was to avoid screen time and a serious strike to my sanity. It was time to hit the road.

I rejected the notion of letting him know that there was such a thing as Toys R Us (even though it’s only a mile away), and I decided against seeing what TJ Maxx might have in its toy section. In truth, a drive didn’t sound like a bad use of time. I was pretty sure the baby would fall asleep (she did) and that the boy would chill (he did. Didn’t even ask for a CD). Lakeshore didn’t have exactly what I was looking for — I’d called but since I don’t really know these toys, I probably didn’t describe correctly — but the bucket of building lego-like thingies they had seemed to fit the bill. I also picked up some tracing cards to have one other trick up my sleeve for quiet-time activities.

He made a little craft while I paid (bonus for coming on a Saturday!), and, despite my getting a little lost in the Mixing Bowl on my way to find 395, we got home just over an hour after we’d left. The purchase even inspired my son to clean up his train set and, by extension, his whole toy area to leave room for building with off-brand legos. So my gas-guzzling consumer trip ended up with an unexpected reward of the impetus to sort stuff and clear the clutter, something I’ve been wanting to do forever. Sitting on the floor pregnant, or with a sore perineum, or with a baby in a sling is not very comfortable, and this time Daddy was back home to hold the girl, so I was thrilled to have the chance to tackle this project.

Let’s hope I don’t take too much from this positive reinforcement, which was topped off by the kiddo later happily going up to bed early and falling asleep before 7:15. But this is not justice, and I had to confess. I know Mother Earth knows anyway, but sometimes you have to tell the tale to stop secretly hoping you’ll get away with doing it again.

There are a lot of emails I haven’t responded to and much more interesting posts I’ve written and never finished getting list to and so never posted. There are a million books I could read while I’m nursing, but at this moment, I feel the need to shout publicly that I am going insane!

Yesterday my son and I watched some video from when he was two. I had to cry to see myself getting a such a kick out of every little thing he would say. That’s because now he will not. Shut Up. I’m sorry, but I cannot stand the incessant stream of commentary. He asks questions about any particle of dust that falls or any grunt the baby makes. He offers unsolicited opinions on everything including activities he wants or doesn’t want to do (today or next summer),  food he wants to eat or doesn’t want to eat (now or for his next birthday), musings on when he’ll see again a child he played with for 20 minutes once at a park that is not in our neighborhood.

There are also mini-tantrums of “No!” and “I want it now!” and the regressive “Uppie!” (pick me up), and yes, those are annoying. But it’s the constant barrage of words coupled with his omniscient physical presence that is maddening. He will not leave us alone. All the baby has to do is sigh, and he is up in her grill., kissing her, stroking her head. Scratch that; she doesn’t have to sigh. She just has to be in the vicinity. No, wait; that’s not right either. She just has to be in the house and, like a heat-seeking missile, he must find her. Yes, I know this is sweet. But all good things in moderation, right? Moder-who, my boy would ask? Screw that; he’s all about intensity.

I wish I could chuckle at it all, but I’m tired. The most common phrase around here lately is “I’m just going to look at her” said with a faux-reassuring tone and raised eyebrows for added innocence factor. He also likes to state reality a lot, as in, “Oh, she’s (fill-in-the-verb)ing.” Other less intelligible sounds include “Bleah!” “Vrroom!” and “Raarr!” accompanied by scary faces and claw hands. This is where I start to remember being a little girl and thinking that boys were kind of bizarre creatures. When you’re holding a crying being who weighs less than 10 pounds, and a 40-pound freak comes charging at you with rival volume, well, it’s a little hard for this mama to remember what she learned in Playful Parenting.

So can I be blamed for counting the minutes until preschool starts on Thursday? My very social kid has a mom who, though extroverted, too, has a strong need for quiet thinking time. And since I am now a nursing mom of a baby that is getting increasingly awake, the minutes I have of quiet that do not also involve me leaning forward to offer my breast or my body supporting baby weight in a sling are numbered. The fact that those minutes are supposed to serve multiple purposes of house chores and cooking and anything-more-than-tolerating my son is posing a challenge for me.

His afternoon playdate just picked him up! Quick! Back to the laptop, Bat-mommy! Strap on the Breast Friend pillow again and nurse the baby into a milky coma, then go get the diapers from the washer that just beeped and hang them out in the sun. Then try in vain to do some of cleaning that the preschooler is so good at quickly undoing when I attempt it in his presence… Okay, forget getting the baby to sleep and instead change a newly poopy diaper while fantasizing about re-posting the stuff that didn’t go the first time on Craigslist or Freecycle or just putting it in my husband’s car to go to Goodwill. At some point — maybe after successfully initiating a sling-induced nap and then setting the baby down with crossed fingers that she’ll stay asleep — take a shower and get ready to pick up aforementioned loud boy-creature to take him to friend’s BBQ where I thoroughly expect to feel small and jealous in the presence of real working moms.

Add clean up baby’s first puke to that list and that takes us up to the present!

I have an essay called “The First Time Around” in an anthology that is coming out soon, From the Heart: A Collection of Stories and Poems from the Front Lines of Parenting. It compares my first year mothering to my first year teaching high school and explores the desire for a do-over, to fix all the mistakes you made the first time around.

So now I am a week and two days into parenting a second child and feel compelled to document this slice of now with a Venn diagram. Alas, I don’t know how to do that on Wordpress and have only so many (how many is never something I can predict) minutes until I will be called to nurse again, plus writing lying down is not the most comfortable thing. So I’m just going to make some lists. Please excuse the lack of parallel structure.

We’ll start with that thing about positions by giving a shout out to the few things that I look back on fondly from my first weeks after my son was born in 2006 via c-section (for a breech position and short cord that prevented him from dropping).

Positives about baby #1’s first weeks

• I could sit. Seriously. A c-section hurts a whole lot, but once you’re upright, you’re cool. I cannot wait to sit without pillows delicately arranged or frozen peas in my underwear.

• I had only one child. There was no monstrous four-year-old lurching around, slamming into his parents, kissing the baby ad nauseum, or needing to be taken to the park to preserve family sanity.

• My husband did everything. I don’t think I changed a diaper for two weeks. (See above that we didn’t have another child to take care of).
  

Similarities across both experiences

• I still have trouble sitting up from lying down and getting up to stand from sitting. It doesn’t hurt in my gut like it did when I was cut open, but the truth is I have no abdominal muscles now anyway, and it does hurt my bottom to switch positions.

• I love looking at my baby.

• Every day is a bad hair day.

Positives about baby #2’s first weeks

• At home! Sunshine instead of yucky florescent light, no strangers waking you up to poke at your progeny, no separation from the baby for hearing tests, no people bringing me (who is gluten-free and dairy-free) a cheeseburger the day after abdominal surgery and the next day, when I begged for something I could eat, telling me, “It’s hard to accommodate special diets.” In the hospital?

• No drug hangovers!

• Milk coming in right away! And like gangbusters! What a concept! After three years of nursing my son, I found out there was still a lot I didn’t know about breastfeeding! But apparently I do know how to get a baby to latch well in any position. No trips to the lactation consultant this time, at least not in the first week.

• A calm baby who seems comfortable in her own skin. Maybe just her temperament, but maybe from coming on her own terms or helped out by the flower essences I took during labor and gave her right after or the essential oils we used. I’m sure actually getting nourishment helps, too.

• Friends helping out — with food, with support, with childcare. And a whole lot of baby clothes.

• Having something of a clue as to what I’m doing and a lot less anxiety about what I’m doing wrong.

• Having a little boy who looks adoringly upon his mother and sister (with a head that seems a lot bigger than it did two weeks ago) and says sweetly, “It’s nice having a new baby.”