Sweet Nocturnal Nothings

It's a very different world during those wee hours of the morning. It's a place reserved for insomniacs, third shift workers, and, of course, new moms.

If you add up all those nights of sleeplessness, you can have some moments of questionable judgement. I'm thinking it must be all the lack of oxygen going to the brain since I yawn more than I speak nowadays. (Isn't that the reason they say you yawn? Lack of oxygen? I'd google it to double check but I'm too tired to even move my clicking finger.)

The first observation I've made about my very awesome hypothesis (No sleepy make you act dweeby) involves the television. Now, when I sleep, I have to have the room dark and quiet. Thus, no tv. (Well, it can be physically present, just not activated. It needs to be sleeping the same time I am.) When you're trying to change a newborn's diaper, however, total darkness doesn't work out for you so much.

The solution? Turn the tv on (muted) to get enough light in the room to make sure you aren't diapering a thigh and not enough to make the kid think it's actually noon instead of midnight. Plus, it will help me stay awake through the feeding process, right? Wrong. I forgot I take my glasses off and now I'm pinned by sweet nursing baby on the arm closest to the stand where my spectacles are. So I'm now watching bad middle-of- the-night programming, and by watching I mean staring zombie like at a blurry blob like area where the tv is.

The second, and probably funniest, observation occurred before I got the ingenious idea to use the tv as a night light. I was using my iPhone as a flash light for a few nights. Yes, I know, there's an app for that. But my screen is also bright enough to illuminate a small area and he's only 6 weeks old, how big is his diapering area anyway?

The problem? My pissed off son (who loathes diaper changes, clothing changes, and anything else that involves water, wipes, or naked parts of his body) gave a one, two jab to the touch screen "flashlight"with his uncovered foot and the next thing I know, my phone is trying to Face Time call someone. I panic, as it's the ungodly time of 2:43 in the morning, and shut it off quickly. Luckily I see that it was my husband that he was trying to get on the line. (Maybe he was like, "Hey Dad, can you bring Mom a flashlight please? It'd make this diaper changing thing go much easier so I can get to the boob juice already.")

So, I guess what I'm saying is, uh, something. It might have even been important. Was it important? Or funny? Or maybe informative? I honestly don't know. I lost my train of thought at 2:30 in the morning. If I find it, I'll get back to you. Meanwhile, whisper some sweet nocturnal nothings in my ear (You'll get 8 hours uninterrupted sleep) and we'll call it a night.

It's Only Dangerous If I Start Thinking

Since I've had some extra time lately, mostly at three a.m. while I'm feeding the bambino, I've found my mind wandering. (Yes, I'm afraid it's as dangerous as it sounds.) Here are some of the things that have crossed over to the vast darkness that is my thought process recently.

Have you seen the new commercials for e-surance? The ones that are scoffing at insurance quotes taking 15 minutes because they can do it in half the time? (They actually say seven and a half minutes in the ad.) Does this remind anyone else of name that tune? "I can quote your auto insurance in five minutes." Are we so busy now that the additional 7 and a half minutes were just too much for us? "Well, I'd go online for a quote, but I just can't find an extra fifteen minutes. I could find eight maybe, but definitely not an entire fifteen."

Does anyone else wonder why we equate tiny infants with large safari or aquatic animals? This year's theme is apparently elephants. I've also seen whales, giraffes, lions, and bears. (The whales on the preemie outfit was a 10 on the ironic meter.) Did we feel that bunnies, lambs, and turtles were just too over done? Did we get hate letters from the National Association of Large Animals accusing us of being discriminatory? I don't really mind if my newborn's tush is covered in sheep or monkeys or trucks, all I'm saying is that it's odd.

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to re-name things that don't make sense? Like Daylight Savings Time. We don't actually save it anywhere. It's not like we have a vault of unused sunlight or jars of sunshine stashed under the bed. (Although how cool would that be when it's dark out at 4 pm in the winter? Just bring out some sunshine and party like it's three months later. Woot woot!) We should call it: Aw shit, the time change is going to throw my schedule off for two weeks Day. ( Or ASTTCIGTTMSOFTW Day for short.) Or maybe: Why the hell do we have to change the damn clock anyway? We're just going to change it back again in five months Day.

Where do socks go when the dryer eats them? Do they go to odd sock heaven? Do they get their own wingtips? (Har de har!) If the mate eventually makes it odd sock heaven too, do they have to leave? And how exactly do they get out of the dryer in the first place? Is there some sort of secret "Sock Escape Hatch" that is invisible to all the non-hosiery amongst us?

Do you think the person who invented coffee was properly worshiped? I mean, he was pretty much a God right? (I'm assuming it was a man since women were only allowed to cook, clean, and whelp young'uns all the live long day.) Did his town give him a parade or his own holiday? Because they really should have. And if they didn't, maybe he can share the holiday reserved for the one that invented chocolate truffles. What do you mean there isn't a holiday for that either? What kind of world do we live in?

Have you seen the new e-surance commercial? The one with the woman who looks like the Grandmother on the old show "The Nanny"? It's hilarious. She posted all her vacation pics to her wall. Her living room wall. After her friend says something she doesn't like she un-friends her. It totally makes me laugh. (Not as much as the Sprint Zombie commercial, but fairly close.) I don't have a rant about it, I just wanted to share that it's funny. 

Yeah, that's the kind of twisted going on up in there. You too can enjoy these quality inane thoughts for the low, low price of sleep deprivation and being a parent of four children! (And wondering how the hell that snuck up on you.) Side effects may include loss of sanity, loss of money, and increased pressure to find your damn car keys.

I Won A Bronze Medal in Giving-A-Crap

So, I really don't care about the Olympics. I know, I know, it's awful. To other people. You wouldn't believe how many people are horrified that I don't watch the Olympics. You'd think I just told them I kick puppies or something. Apparently, not having an interest in watching teams competing for pretty metal necklaces makes me less of an American. Who knew?

The thing is, I don't know these people. I can barely work up the enthusiasm for my own kid's sporting events. And I gave birth to them! I owe them my support, love, and the falsest, happy smile that says "I love being at sporting events" that I can muster. These people that I don't know? Eh, not so much. At most I can give them thirty seconds of attention as their name passes my home page's news feed. (Although, to be fair, I'll probably get distracted by something shinier like which celebrity went to rehab last weekend.)

It comes back to bite me in the ass though, since I am apparently the one person in the entire universe who does NOT watch the Olympics. They all have something to discuss and here I am on the sidelines, twiddling my thumbs. Maybe adding an inane comment like, "Yeah, how about Japan, eh?" Inwardly I'm thinking, "Oh. My. Gawd! Aren't they over yet? It's screwing up my television schedule, the shows I really want to watch. Who cares who got a gold medal in figure skating? Gah!"

Trying to bullshit my way through a conversation about Olympics with a regular person isn't as bad as one with a person who is obsessed with them. Like the "I DVR'ed every second of the Olympics to watch it again and again" kind of people. The ones who talk about the athletes like they know them. (Although, if they watched the back story six or seven times, maybe they feel like they do know them?) They are the ones who are not fooled with your generic comments about how good of a match (game? competition? event?) it was. They smell the lack of patriotism of the Olympics challenged, thus resulting in the stench of severe disappointment that you do not share their own zeal.

So, the next time we get together, make sure you ask me what I thought about the Canadian hockey game. I didn't watch it, but it could be fun to watch me make something up, right? And you never know, maybe I retained something in that thirty seconds of news I read. But probably not.

A Terminal Case of Amnesia

Women have the amazing capacity to forget the aches, pains, and amount of time involved in pregnancy and labor. It's why we don't all have just one child. We convince ourselves that "It was all worth it." Which it totally is. But we also have a tendency to have selective memory loss when it comes to other things as well. Like sleep deprivation.

Yes, newborn babies come with a lot of needs. The most basic one, feeding, happens often with a being so shiny and new. Which means you get up during the middle of the night. A lot of nights in a row. Diaper, swaddle, feed, repeat. By the end of the first week you start doing night feedings on auto pilot. (I'm always thrilled when I find the diaper on correctly the next morning.) After the first 2 weeks, I'm doing everything on autopilot. As long as the kids don't have breast milk in their school lunches and the baby doesn't have the juice boxes, I figure I'm doing alright.

Another thing we forget? A lot of shit. No, seriously, the copious amounts of poop that come from the smallest person in your household. I still cannot get over how many times that baby has a bowel movement. There shouldn't be anything left! And the stench! How those tiny little things come out with a stink so big is inconceivable to me. My theory is that it's to make you appreciate that fresh from the bath baby smell. (Which is like a drug, isn't it? I always wear off the baby bath smell from getting my baby head sniff fix.)

I also forgot how pissed off new babies get when you try to change them. Changing diapers, changing clothes, or even giving him a sponge bath......you'd think I'm murdering the kid with how indignant he is. Now, I get the whole cold and naked thing, but who doesn't like getting clean clothes or fresh "underwear"? Newborns, that's who. Apparently cleanliness is mot next to Godliness in their book. "Just stay away from the snaps on my jumpsuit and no one gets hurt!"

And if you have boys, and you have them circumcised, you forget how awful it is the first few days after that procedure is done. I actually have to stop myself from apologizing to him every time I change his diaper. It doesn't even seem to bother him much now that's it's healing, but I still feel guilty. The one thing I placate myself with is that I wasn't there when they did it, so at least he doesn't associate this betrayal of skin mutilation with his mama!

Or maybe we don't forget but we figure it's a trade off. For every sleepless moment, we get sweet milky baby smiles. For every doody duty we deal with, we get minutes watching them in the deep sleep of the innocent. For every squalling, wet, naked baby that we have, we also enjoy the freshly bathed baby that comes after it.

Then again, maybe all the sleep deprivation starts eating brain cells and we really have forgotten. I'd like to think about this in more depth but sadly, I haven't slept in weeks. Get back to me in a few years when the kid starts school.

When Good Wives Go Bad

We all know that men and women are extremely different creatures. Okay, well, women know this. Guys don't seem to get it. which means I'm often a bad wife. Case in point, the following conversation that I had with my husband tonight:

Husband: What do you want for Valentine's Day?

Me: (thinking: What I really want is for a you to not shop for a gift for me at the 11th hour like you've done for every single birthday, Christmas, anniversary and Mother's Day we've been together, but you're a guy and that's how you shop so I guess I'm never getting that.) What I actually said was: You should know me well enough after all this time to be able to pick out Valentine's Day gift for me.

Husband: What's that supposed to mean?

Me: That we've been together so long that I shouldn't have to tell you what to get me.

Husband: No, I mean, what's that supposed to mean? What am I supposed to know what to get you?
(See, he's still angling to get me to name a specific item!)

Me: I don't know? A card?

Husband: Oh, that's romantic.

Okay, so here's where the man/woman difference starts to come into play. I'm thinking, "We just had a baby. We shouldn't be wasting money on gifts that we don't need since we're adding the expense of another child. Just get me a token card so that you can save face with the Official Men of America Club who would never forgive one of their married members for not getting something for their spouse on Valentine's Day." He's thinking, "It's Valentine's Day. Women like gifts for Valentine's Day. I have to buy her a gift. How much I spend will directly correlate with how much I love her." I'm being practical and boring. He's being romantic and loving.

If that conversation isn't enough to show you men and women come from different planets, how about the one that came right after?

Husband: (holding shirt out) Do me a favor. Smell this.

Me: What? No!

Husband: No, seriously, just smell this.

Me: No!

Now, another guy probably would have taken the smell challenge. Girls don't ask each other to do things like play the "Smell this and tell me if it smells ok enough to wear another day" game. And guys don't understand why their ladies get offended by that. Because they'd smell a shirt if we asked them to. So what's the big deal?

What does success smell like?

Punxsutawney? More Like Punk's A Wrong-y!

So it's been over a week since Groundhog Day. I've been chewing on this all week, trying to figure out who decided it would be fun to use a rodent as a weather forecaster. Yes, I do realize that in this age of information I could probably look it up and know for certain. I, however, find that's not as much fun as speculation and supposition.

I'm guessing some guy named Phil was bored one February first some time ago. He was hanging in his parent's basement and just couldn't decide what to do the next day. It was cold, snowy and pretty much the usual weather pattern for February in Pennsylvania and he thought, "Man, if it was spring, I'd have something cool to do instead of shoveling more snow." This was when Phil got the bright idea to use a gopher to predict how much winter was left in the season.

Sadly, he couldn't locate a gopher, but his friend, Ted, knew where to score a groundhog. He was pretty skittish though and liked to burrow in holes. Another bright idea! He can predict the weather if he sees his shadow when he comes out of the hole in the ground. Unfortunately, the town that Phil lived in only had paved and graveled surfaces and there wasn't anywhere with dirt to dig a hole. This meant that he had to travel to the next town over, Gobbler's Knob (tee hee hee), in order to dig the hole for the ground hog to pop out of. And thus the stupid tradition was born.

The funny thing is there are a lot of people who take this to be fact. If the groundhog sees his shadow there are six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't "winter will soon end". (They don't even give you an actual time frame. Just soon.) Now, I understand that kids take this to be gospel. They have Santa, the tooth fairy, and the Easter Bunny. A weather predicting rodent isn't that much of a stretch for them. What gets me are the adults that swear that it must be true. Um, yes, it is. It's called, "We are having six more weeks of winter since it's only February and spring doesn't start until March 20th." If you live in New York, or any of the other colder states, you count yourself lucky if you ONLY have six more weeks. We've had snow into April before and let me tell you how much it sucks. (A lot.)

And if you really think about it, doesn't the weather really predict if the rodent will see his shadow? Even a caveman could get this concept. "Sun make shadow on ground, clouds no give shadow on ground." So that means the groundhog really isn't predicting anything and there's a 50-50 chance of a shadow sighting.

Since we're definitely having six more weeks of winter anyway, that means good ol' Punxsutawney Phil doesn't have a 100% success rate. Oh Phil, that's not good for job security! In this economy you better be careful. Before you know it, they'll replace you with an iPad with a Groundhog Day app.

Who Needs Discipline When You Have Political Correctness?

Remember the good old days when you could spank your kid when they were rotten brats and no one accused you of being a child abuser? Before everyone came in with their opinions that you're damaging your kid's psyche and causing them irreparable mental anguish? Long before people got their kicks off finding sexual nuances in everyone's actions? Ahh, the good old days.

I'm not sure exactly what happened but I suspect that it had something to do with the old adage "It takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch." All it took was a few child abusing sickos to make the new politically correct America ban laying a hand on your kids. Yeah, I agree that those dumb ass abusing turds need to be shoved in a dark room and left to die slowly, but why should good parents have to pay their price? Our great grandparents, our grandparents, hell even our parents got a smack on the ass from their own parents when they did dumb things like run with scissors or mean things like pull Susie Smith's pigtails hard enough to make her cry.

Now we can't do that. We have to have "time outs" and "feelings talks". Basically, we've regressed back to the free wheeling love phase of the 70's. (Or wait, was that the 60's?) We explore our feelings. We try to understand why it happened instead of trying to actually correct the behavior. Because if we know why, we can fix the root of the problem, right? With what? Wagging fingers and big frowny faces? How is that better than a swat on the ass? And what if the root of the problem is a spoiled, pain in the ass kid who needs to be taken down a peg or two?

So us parents fumble through this new aged "love will make everything swell" parenting style and what do we get? Punks like Justin Bieber causing 20 thousand dollars of damage to his neighbors house from egging it. Let me repeat that in case you missed it. Twenty thousand dollars of damage. From egging. At nineteen years old. I don't care if my kid was 30 and did this, I'd probably give him an ass beating and make him stand in a corner for a few days. Harm his psyche my foot. Just because the Biebs is a celeb that means we can forgive him for his downward spiral into the dregs of Hollywood's has beens? Who needs consequences when you have enough to buy a really good lawyer?

Secretly I pine for the simpler days of being trusted to parent my own kids without being micro managed by "the man" and constantly suspected of abusing my babies because I spank them. (Because a single spank is somehow corporal punishment.) Until then, I guess I'll read up on new ways to connect with my child on a more spiritual level without causing them to need therapy for twenty years. Should be a blast.

Who Wears The Pants Now?

Do you want to know who wears the pants now? I do. That's right, today was the first day I wore non-stretchy and/or maternity pants in five months. Yup, pants with actual zippers and buttons. Big girl pants. That I was wearing today. For the first time in a long time. Go me!

I miss the stretchy panel freedom. Sigh.

Pregnancy is great in that you don't have to suck your flabby gut in for at least 5 months. Sometimes six if you're really skinny and start to show early. (Although if you're really skinny you probably don't know what sucking your gut in means, now do you you skinny bitch?) Once you start to show you make the transition to stretchy pants. Probably not maternity pants right away because they're made for big girl pregnancy bellies. Like I-haven't seen-my-feet-in-months bellies. So it starts with yoga pants, sweats, and leggings.

Then you do start to need the big ol' maternity pants. Wow, they look like regular pants on the bottom but the top has a stretchy fabric designed to fit over the gestating belly! Amazing! At first I was irritated having that elastic hiked up over the ginormous belly, stopping just a millimeter shy under boobtopia. But as the days went on, I kinda got used to it. In fact, with the really cold weather we had, I felt a smidgen warmer since I had extra skin covered. Between the height of the pants and the length of the shirts, I was pretty well covered the last few months of my pregnancy.

Then you have the baby and still have The Belly. So you probably still wear the maternity pants. If it's your first kid, this more than likely bums you out. If it's the second, third and so on, you expect this. You might even be like me and revel in your elastic freedom for just a little bit longer. After all, you know that Hollywood (and your cousin "I'm a size zero" Anna) lied to you about returning to a size six fourteen minutes after giving birth. You've been inducted into "The Real Woman's Club" where spit up happens, yoga pants become a staple wardrobe piece, and cookies might have been breakfast this morning as you carpooled on a mere three hours of sleep because you have a newborn in the house.

Thus the day does come that you are too small for your maternity pants and have to transition back into regular pants. That zip and button and pinch and squeeze. (Because my real women's club comes exclusively with a muffin top and stretch marks too! Oh joyous day!) So you re-learn the painful art of sucking it in and wearing uncomfortable pants because you are horrified to buy the next size up and would rather just squeeze into the size you have. Because it's the size you want to be. If you wear it, it's your size. So cramming myself into my size 10's is preferable to lounging casually (and comfortably) in a size 12. (It's Woman Logic 101.)

As long as you aren't busting buttons off and potentially blinding some well meaning man walking by with said flying buttons, it's a good day. Even if I do have two muffin tops and a scary desire for spanx.