What About Boob?

Now that I'm a reluctant housewife/stay-at-home mom/work from home mom, I have a bit of guilt about something.
My daughter and I were at our first playgroup on Tuesday and my daughter got hungry towards the end.  So I do what any mom would do. I open up the little cooler bag I tote in the diaper bag and mix up a batch of formula.  And then I watch in horror as just about every other woman in the playgroup whips out a boob to feed their kid. 
I don't mean I was horrified to see nursing in public.  Quite the contrary. I was horrified that I wasn't whipping out my boob as if this was some type of twisted grown-up, non-collegiate version of a wet t-shirt contest and the woman with the ripest boob wins.
Let me back up.
I started out breast feeding my daughter.  I had great intentions with it.  I was going to breast feed for AT LEAST 6 months and everything would be fantastic and I would know she was getting the best nutrition. But coming home from the hospital was a different story. I came home and my daughter wouldn't latch.  I tried those Medela nipple shields to no happy result. I contacted LaLeche League for help. I consulted breast feeding specialists all who told me to use the shields. They didn't work and I knew I couldn't have a breast specialist on staff all day every day to hold my boob in one hand and my daughter's head at a certain angle in the other. I was frustrated. My daughter was frustrated and my husband was frustrated.  I am a woman who is going to make her own baby food in a couple of weeks using all organic materials for Christ's sake so the thought of formula feeding didn't sit well with me.

I still gave it a college try though. I pumped for 3 hours a day for 8 weeks to give to my daughter and we supplemented with formula.  However, 3 hours a day is a lot to be hooked to a dairy machine and then you still have to feed the kid and do other jobs. It's pretty limited to be hooked up to the breast pump.  It's not like I can put my pump in a sling and do the dishes. I came home from the hospital and didn't have a drop of formula in the house. So my husband had to go get formula and be worried that he bought the right type. (The best advice I will give any new mom is to always have at least one can or ready to feed bottle of formula in the house just in case because I know of so many moms who had good intentions but had to go do the formula run when they got home.)

To make matters infinitely worse, at week 2, my daughter developed severe reflux and a milk allergy.  Enter the soy formula and the great formula throw out of 2010. We went through 6 different formulas trying to find one that didn't end up projectiled across the room on the cat. We finally found one only to have my daycare ( I was still working then) provide a different kind for free.  So we switched again.  After daycare ended, we tried switching again to a gentle formula. Projectile to the cat.

So back to playgroup and guilt. I felt like the lowest mother in the world.  But thankfully I wasn't alone. Another woman must have been feeling the same thing. She tentatively said, "I tried to breastfeed but I couldn't make enough and my baby was losing weight."  I think she must have been relieved to see my Tommee Tippee bottle in hand and I think we instantly bonded.  I told her I had the opposite problem and I think we realized that between the two of us, we would have had a great wet nurse thing going.  The main problem that we have though, is that we are both at home during the day.  Shouldn't we devote hours and infinite amounts of time to make breastfeeding work? I can understand a working mom that doesn't have 3 hours a day to pump or have someone help her, but a stay at home mom should be boob feeding exclusively right?

But why am I feeling guilty in the first place? When I sit down and think about it, my child is getting all of the vitamins and minerals she needs and is perfectly healthy and gaining weight ahead of her growth curve. Why is this such a guilt-wrenching topic for so many women? Why is the whole world concerned with our boobs? For God's sake, one week after giving birth, I was trimming the hedge and a neighbor rolls by in her car and rolls down the window and yells "Are you breastfeeding? How is it going? I would love to talk to you about breastfeeding if you get a chance."   I just smiled and said I had everything under control, but since when did boobs of a new mom get so much attention?  What business is it of hers and why is she talking to me about breastfeeding like she's selling me Amway?  "I'd love to talk to you about the benefits of Amway."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that for all the moms out there that can't breastfeed, don't let the boob pushers of the world get to you.  Are they out there and are they called breast Nazis by those mothers that are brow beaten for offering Similac instead of teet? You bet. But as long as a child is growing and smiles in the morning when she looks at mommy and has her "I love Mommy" bib on, what is the big deal?

For all the formula feeders, I think we should be proud we gave it a good try and just go on with our lives.  Easier said then done, but I'm going to try.

Update on Illness and My Hot Mess

Well, I'm still sick.  I didn't sleep for two nights after receiving sulfer antibiotics and went to the ER, Urgent Care (again) and was at the pharmacy twice yesterday.  After an exhausting day that involved me accidentally shoplifting pedialyte from the grocery store and my mother-in-law riding to the rescue to take care of my daughter while I'm down and my husband works, I finally started to feel a bit better.

Now an update.
Short of pancake batter on my cabinets, my husband has done a smashing job.  I really have to hand it to the man who works all day, freelances at night, and has been putting that aside to take care of our daughter when she wants to play "drop that binky." You know. The game where the pacifier comes out every 15 seconds and then she moves around and whines until you give it back to her.  Then she spits it out after 15 seconds. Repeat. I think he now appreciates what I do on a daily basis.  He had to sterilize 3 rounds of bottles, play "drop that binky" change the daily poopy diaper, and make sure she had adequate gym and tummy time as well as flashcard, mirror, and story time. Throw in laundry and house work with all of that and he has my day in a nutshell.

In a way, I'm glad he was able to see what I do now on a daily basis and exactly how hard it can be.

Now I'm just crossing my fingers that my daughter doesn't get this.  But as my mother told me, "She has food in it with all the vitamins she needs and she doesn't have anyone keeping her from resting."  That's probably true.  Fingers crossed she does ok!

A Hot Mess

I've been sick.  First, I wish to tell you just how sick I've been so that I can garner a lot of sympathy. Imagine having a cold complete with sinus congestion, chest congestion, fever, and sore throat and throw in viral pink eye and deep concern that you have strep throat as well. Now, I went to urgent care today and did not have strep, but they gave me anti-biotics anyway because I think they thought I was just exceptionally gross and probably needed them anyway for some indescretion at some point in my life.
My daughter had a cold a week or so ago, so I guess she gave this to me.  I'm hoping it went down that way, otherwise I'm scared that this will go to her.  But even more scary is what happens to my house when I'm down.
My husband is a saint. Make no mistake about it.  He's taken his own time on a 3 day weekend to run the house and look after a 3 month old and a 34 year old.  However, no matter how good a husband is, there's always some "what the hell happened" when the mom gets out of bed.
Why is my kitchen floor sticky?
No. The bottles in the rubbermaid dish are clean NOT dirty.
Kitchen towels are not spoon rests.
Burning burgers in the electric skillet does not bode well for the electric skillet.
Why does it look like one of the cats was caught in a chain saw and there's fur all over?

In short, I wandered out into the daylight today and thought "My house is a hot mess."

Poor hubs. I came home from the doctor and he said, and I quote, "She hates me. She pooped all over. She wouldn't eat and she's angry. ANGRY."

I picked up my daughter, who was in an outfit that I have no idea where he got it, and she immediately went to sleep. 
Sometimes, only mom will do. Even if she's sick as a dog.

Mind Mush

When I told some women that I used to work with that I was becoming a stay-at-home mom they told me that they tried it too.  However, they came screaming back to the working mom fold after 6 months of what I like to call "mind mush."  Mind mush describes what happens to you when you start talking baby talk to other adults and when you forget your grown-up manners.
I poo pooed this idea thinking that it could never happen to me.  I'm cultured, well-traveled, and articulate.
However, I found myself in the grocery store the other night humming "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" to myself.  To make matters worse, I was bagging my groceries and wiped my nose on my shirt sleeve without a second thought as to who was looking and any consequences of my actions because I'm so used to improvising a wipe to my daughter's nose.
Lastly, last night I caught myself singing "Poopy in My Pants."  For those of you that follow American Idol, there was an audition contestant who sang a song for his audition that went like this:

Pants on the ground
Pants on the ground
Looking like a fool with your pants on the ground.

My song was set to that tune and went like this:

Poopy in your pants
Poopy in your pants
Looking like a fool with some poopy in your pants

My daughter cood and smiled as if it was the best thing she'd ever heard.  And after 3 months of hearing me sing "Jesus Loves Me," it may be.
I just smiled at her and remembered that I have a masters degree in organizational communication.
I guess it's all downhill in the brain from here huh?

If Cleanliness is Next to Godliness, Then I'm Four States Over

One of my husband's friends once described our house as "lived in" and I'm not sure if it was meant to be a compliment or not. However, my friends know that I am not the most meticulous housekeeper in the neighborhood.
Or at least I haven't been.
One facet of housewife/stay at home mom world is that we're expected to have a cleaner house. Right?
I spent all day yesterday sweeping the stairs and cleaning the carpet, laundry, sanitizing doorknobs and light switches (it's flu season, folks) and meticulously removing cat hair from our suede couch. About 8:30 last night, I started to wonder why.  Why was I doing this? Did I need to work my rear off (literally since I've lost 3 lbs this week because I'm not sitting in a cubicle) because I'm guilty about not bringing home a paycheck?

I was messy in my single days. Now throw into the mix a baby girl with a diaper pail from the 6th layer of hell, 3 cats (one of whom has a hairy bottom that poo gets stuck to,) and a husband who never cleaned a bathroom before we got married.  We have the makings of an episode of Hoarders.

Here's another story for you. When we both worked, we were in charge of cleaning our respective bathroom, and my husband's best friend stayed a weekend. His best friend used both bathrooms that weekend and said to my hubs, "The difference between your bathroom and Tori's is that I have to clean Tori's after I'm done and I have to clean yours before I sit down or touch anything."  This was a man that said this.

I made a decision after working so hard last night. I'm not going to take it so hard. I'll do what I can, and I may win a few battles, but over the next few years I'm going to have to face up to the fact that I am going to lose the war.  We want to have another baby fairly close to our daughter, so throw another kid in diapers into this and you have the makings of a full-on health department situation here. I'm resigned to keep my old carpet until the kool-aid spills and mud tracking days are over. (I hope my husband grows out of that stage soon.) I may as well look for a couch to purchase in 2021, because that's the next time anything new will grace our doorstep.

Just because I'm a stay at home mom now doesn't mean that I need to kill myself making sure there is no soap scum on the bathtub right?  I certainly don't want to be like my mom who would shriek "I can't have anything nice" when something was spilled, tracked in, or when my sister's imaginary friend, Stacy Turnip, defiled something in the house. I want to enjoy my child/children and show her how to clean it up, talk to her about how to be more careful, and then move on with our lives.

So I made some goals to live by in the next few years.
#1- No visible cat poop on the floor.
#2- Use the air purifier and hope nobody develops asthma
#3- Stay on top of trash and dishes
Other than that, I am going to just try to avoid cockroaches and hope nobody gets impetigo.

If that doesn't work, I will keep in mind what my friend Neil once posted as his facebook status.
"Somebody will come to clean your house when you die. You may as well enjoy life."

The Things To Do List Dilemma

If any of my readers are my former co-workers, they know about a little thing called my "Things To Do" sheet that I had on my desk at all times. I never worked in my Outlook calendar or task list in Office, but I used this ridiculous sheet of paper with boxes I could check. If anyone wanted to peeve me off or throw off my whole day, they just needed to take this list away. In fact, every year at April Fools, some joker loved to hide it. My former boss asked that I have a task list to work from and kicked me out of his office once he found out it was on paper. Antiquated? Yes. But it worked for me.

I would print 5 off every Friday afternoon, staple it neatly in the left hand corner at a certain angle and enter the meetings for next week onto the respective sheets. As the week progressed, I would update it nightly to document what would be done the next day. If I went home and something was undone, I freaked out and the whole day was crud. Anal retentive? Maybe. I lived by it and died by it.

Today is my first official day of being a stay-at-home mom (hereforth SHM) and the lack of this list is my biggest obstacle.  I've been incredibly productive today in the form of writing an article, sweeping cobwebs out of corners (literally) doing a load of laundry, cleaning up the cat puke on the floor, sterilizing bottles, doing tummy time with my daughter, reading a story about belly buttons and how everyone has them, etc. (Although I'm pretty sure the story is wrong and giraffes and snakes don't have belly buttons.  My 2- month-old daughter and I had a long talk about how you can't believe everything you read. But I digress.) However, I'm going nuts with the fact that I have a mental list of stuff to do that is half-arse written on a wipe board and can't really wrap my head around doing any of it.

Why?

I have always operated with the assumption that I am going back to work.  For example, I need to clean my baseboards. In the past, I'd write that down to do on a random Tuesday night.  However, now it's just some task that I need to get done in the next 4 years before my kid goes to preschool.  I have no deadline. I have all the time in the world. Well, maybe not all the time in the world, but I have an open expanse of time that is not packaged into any neat minute, hour, or even day.  I can now clean out the garage over the course of a month other than knowing that I need to do it in one day because I have to work the rest of the week and there will be more things to do next weekend. Knowing that I have more expanse of time to complete tasks may sound like heaven to some, but to this Type A with OCD, it seems like a vast wasteland that I'll need Moses to lead me through especially when I don't know what a reasonable achievement goal for the day actually is. Will I have time to put my maternity clothes into storage or will my daughter have other ideas?

In short, I'm beginning to realize that nothing goes as planned when you stay at home.  I've always thought that SHMs and housewives had parceled and structured lives with Days of Our Lives everyday at 2:00 and lunch at 11:30 or noon. In actuality, I think the working world is way more structured and predictable.

So I'll put my list of things to do on the nursery door and try to work my way through them as best I can and be kind to myself when they don't get done. Who cares right? I have years to clean the bathroom.