random photo monday: what everybody's thinking

our thanks to anicca for the perfect onesie...

things i love wednesday: father/daughter bonding

i walked in on this scene the other day and had to shoot some photos of bryan commiserating with LP.

random photo monday: sweet babydog

this photo just kills me.

random photo monday: naughty water

we volunteer at a local no-kill dog shelter, and the last time i worked a shift there, i found this sitting on a chair in the breezeway.

langley at two months

dear little boognish,

last sunday you turned eight weeks old, and your grandparents were here to witness it. i swear, in just the one week they were visiting, you managed to become a completely different baby than the week before. you’re smiling on purpose more often, you’re cooing, and sweet jesus, are you gaining control of that bobble head of yours. we barely have to support it anymore - you just wobble it all around like a little champ. it’s incredible. we even started putting you in your bumbo, although we have to keep our hands at the ready in case you decide to try to whip your head around a bit too much.

a few days after your two-month milestone, we took you out on the lake on a pontoon boat. with malichai. and five adults who were drinking alcohol. i know! we are crazy. about five minutes in, we thought we’d made possibly the worst decision of our lives, but once we got out on the open water, you seemed pretty cool with the whole situation. there you were, just hanging out on a boat in your diaper, lounging in your bassinet and taking bottles from whoever wasn’t swimming with the dog at the moment. your dad took you into the lake with him, although thankfully he didn’t try to make you swim. but you seemed to enjoy getting your feet wet and having water dripped on you a bit. later, you even let us go to a restaurant and eat lunch without making a scene. you were truly a great little traveler, which stands to reason considering your mother’s childhood and the fact that you were forced onto several cramped planes, including some rather scary turboprop planes, while you were cooking in the womb just so your mama could go see a band play in virginia.

the past few weeks, you have grown increasingly interested in the ceiling in general and ceiling fans in particular. your grandpa decided this must be because you are an alien from a planet far away where ceiling fans are your gods. whenever you would start to fuss, grandpa would just carry you into the living room and point out the fan, and there the two of you would worship for a good half hour. i think maybe grandpa’s been hanging out with your dad and me a bit too long, making up ridiculous back stories like that. i can’t even imagine the things you will try to tell your classmates and teachers someday. i have a feeling we might spend a lot of time in parent-teacher conferences trying to explain why our daughter told susie that her barbie doll was once a taiwanese hooker with a major heroin addiction but later went on to teach blind lepers how to make lace doilies for aged carnies in retirement homes. i hope those teachers have a great sense of humor!

love,

mamadog

ps - you’re wearing some of your six-month clothes already. please stop growing up so fast!

champagne thursday: toast #45

ah, the grandparents. they've given bryan and me a nice little vacation by coming out for a visit and doing so much with the baby. things like tiring her out to the point that she sleeps for 7 1/2 hours straight, without so much as a peep.

random photo monday: aiko's haircut

aiko was shorn like a sheep the other day, and she's never been happier...until her dad used that phrase, and her poor little ears perked up and she looked all expectant, and we realized that she still remembered the word for her favorite toy when she was a puppy. her guts-ripped-out-many-many-moons-ago favorite toy. sorry, aiko.

overheard in the whitney house: commercials

so there is a ford ad running right now that starts out with a guy talking in a perfectly commercial-y and generally non-incendiary manner. my husband apparently took offense and thought the ad required a much nastier plot line.

commercial: people ask me, "mike, why ford? why now? and i say..."

bryan: "because I SHIT IN YOUR MOUTH."

for some reason, his response to this commercial cracked us up for at least a half hour. then it came up in a text conversation about the baby.

bryan: "she hates to poop."

me: "she is not poop's biggest fan."

bryan: "poop is not on her baby facebook friends list."

me: "people ask her 'why poop? why now? and she's all 'i'll shit in your mouth!'"

champagne thursday: toast #44

i'm kind of sad that this post isn't the 43rd champagne thursday toast because it goes out to my mom, and 43 is her favorite number. i thank my mother so much for the way she always reassured me that giving birth does not necessarily play out the way it is consistently conveyed in movies and television. she always told me not to believe all the screaming and cursing and overall hellishness of the whole process, and i cannot thank her enough for it because, even though i was still fairly terrified of going through it, i had her calming words to make me believe that it wasn't going to be that bad.

it's awful what women do to each other. when you're pregnant, or even talking about wanting to become pregnant, there is no shortage of women who will bombard you with horror stories of 36-hour labors and white-knuckle pain. and i'm talking about women who weren't even crazy/brave enough to go without epidurals or any kind of traditional pain management. stories like these, and even those of women who went through natural labor, are just the grown-up version of the terrible ways girls in middle school treat each other.

i'm not going to pretend to know what it's like to be dilated beyond 4 cm without the benefit of an epidural. i have no idea how bad contractions get after that point, or what it feels like to be stitched up afterward without pain medication, but stories like those told by dooce here, here and here are the reason that so many women have panic attacks about labor and delivery. i'm not trying to invalidate her experience in any way - i'm sure it is extremely painful to go through the process without an epidural. i'm certain of it. but the drama with which these kinds of stories are told is outrageous. it's like when someone tells you that they were in labor with their child for 27 hours. yes, okay, you were, but how much of that time were you actually in any discomfort? most women don't even know they're in labor for a good portion of it, and they only find out later when it had actually started. my water broke at 9 pm one night, and langley was born at 12:33 pm the next day, so yes, i was in labor for at least 15 hours. but i didn't feel any contractions until well after midnight, and i didn't have contractions that were all that unpleasant until after 5 am. i have no idea how long the hours after that would have felt had i opted for a natural delivery, and i don't want to know. i can say that up until 8:30 am, the most uncomfortable part of my labor was getting the epidural, although it wasn't because the epidural itself was painful, only that the doctor administering it had trouble inserting it and compounded the problem by trying to be funny about it. after that, the most uncomfortable part of the delivery was the "stretching" process, which, even with pain medication, was not something i would repeat just for funsies. i did not scream during the delivery, and i did not wish death upon my husband. i did not have 12 people rubbing my back, and i did not once think that i couldn't get through the delivery.

i say all this not to belittle anyone who had painful labor experiences, only to reassure other women that not every horrible thing you hear about giving birth is true or is going to happen to you. if hearing someone tell a far less dramatic version of the usual war stories eases the anxiety of just one woman the way my mother's stories helped to ease mine, i'll be happy.

random photo monday: angry baby

bryan and i laughed about this photo for a good 10 minutes. some people would think we were mean for laughing at a baby that is clearly upset about something. we just call it trying to stay sane in the wake of a fussy baby.