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** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** This is my family updates blog. I'm sorry to say that it's moved to Facebook. If you would like to continue to read about my life, you need to be my Facebook friend.  |
Yesterday was two months exactly since Jack was born. I weigh 155, which means I have lost 35 lbs. Not bad. We went to the doctor yesterday and Jack weighed 12.1 lbs and measured 24 inches. They said weight was above 60% and height was above 80%. And there was no problems to really talk about at the well-baby. The cradle cap and face rash has all but disappeared. The doctor said all else looks normal, although he does have a tendancy to turn his head to the right more than the left. Not sure what that's all about. He said it should correct itself in a couple months when he starts standing and crawling. Oh, he also said that one side of his smile is lower than the other - not that that's a problem, that's just who he is. Of course today Jack has had a small fever (99.4), his first one ever. This is due probably to the immunizations he got yesterday. The result is a sleepy, cranky baby. I'm hoping the Tylenol will make him feel better. Yesterday was a busy day because we also had a little orientation and visit at the day care center he'll be starting on the 14th. It looks really great! I'm excited because the whole thing is turning out much better than I thought. They call it family style childcare. The rooms have 10-14 babies of all ages - from 6 wks to 18 mos. They say this is great because the older ones usually teach the younger ones. I'm hoping this will help develop Jack's vocab and motor skills quicker. I got a kick out of the infant art they do. I guess they put the babies in their mini-highchairs with finger paints and paper and let them go to town. Hehehe...so that should be interesting. They get to go outside and when they get old enough to have regular meals all the kids in a room sit down together and have their baby food at one table. It's very military because they follow a pretty set schedule. I like that because then we can expect Jack to nap and eat at about the same time on the weekends. It will make it easier to plan an outing. |
| There's a new girl running my trail at 5am and I hate her. I hate how she is as thin as a pole and has no boobs. I hate how she wears an XXL white t-shirt which drapes her like a tent. I hate how she runs weird with her toes pointing inward. I hate how she doesn't have an ankle brace. I hate how she runs faster than me but doesn't seem at all out of breath. I hate how she runs every inch of the trail while I cut corners and run in the grass. What I hate more than her is how I can't hate her properly. Perhaps if I knew her better I could link her abnormal speed with some personality flaw...like the fact that she would be willing to sell her soul to the Devil to obtain supernatural speed. Thinking these thoughts I was actually able to pace her. Nothing like a good competition. If this entry isn't a sign that the human psyche is flawed, I don't know what is. But anyway, it was a good run. I was breathing pretty good. Believe it or not I would be a great runner if I had decent lungs. Unfortunately my legs will outpace them even with a bad ankle. I'm one of those people who sounds like they're dying the whole way because of how heavy I breathe. If I push myself too hard I will hyperventilate. It's been like that ever since I got heat exhaustion in Quantico six years ago. Stupid lungs! |
Good news! I tried my uniforms on yesterday and they actually fit. This isn't the miracle you may thing it is. They were always too big for me. The reason for this was that going into the Navy (and they fitted us for uniforms on the third day) I weighed about 15 lbs more than usual due to stress eating that disasterous year I was in law school. Combine that with the ladies who fitted and tailored my uniforms at OCS who actually told me that the Navy didn't want me to look too sexy. The result is that after months of training and losing all my extra law school weight plus some I had uniforms that sagged miserably on my body. This is why I have always tended to wear the uniform skirt. No, I don't care what some senior chief thinks of my legs. It was just more comfortable. It's a-line so I could just cinch the waist with the belt and it actually looks somewhat form-fitting. The pants were a joke. I tried to get them retailored and they still seemed too big. I had superior officers tell me I needed new uniforms sometimes. But ya know what, I paid $1200 for all these uniforms and I'm not going to buy new ones. Now with the baby weight these uniforms are fitting like they were probably always meant to fit, giving me a figure that any forties-era housewife would envy. Ah...the wide hips! I don't think it will last though. With the running and a return to my bodies old food intolerances, I'm losing weight quickly. I feel like the incredible shrinking woman. |
I got some input on my last entry about the walkers. I think we might end up getting one for the simple reason that this baby wants to see the world. More often than not Jack wants to be moving around looking at things. He loves when you pick him up and carry him around and show him stuff. And even better than doing that at home is going somewhere else and doing it. At the store I try to show him everything we intend to buy, and it seems like he always has an opinion. Very few times during the day will he be content to sit on his play mat and bat at his baby toys. He actually watches tv now which is interesting. He'll sit on the couch with you and watch the television. It must be fascinating with all the flashing and colors. Commercials are especially engrossing to him. It's kind of scary that someone so young could already be forming such an attachment to TV, but these days it seems inevitable. |
| I have caught Jack almost rolling over from back to belly. So close. Maybe in a week or so he'll have it. He's getting more dexterous. Another trick he likes is raising his legs and butt up. He does this a lot on the changing table as if he's trying to help out. He thinks it's loads of fun...at least he's smiling a lot. In general, Jack loves kicking his feet and standing. Chris keeps saying we will need to get a walker for him soon. I have mixed feelings about this because I keep reading that those things can actually retard babies learning to walk because of weird balance issues or something. Chris thinks it's baloney. Maybe it is. |
I couldn't help feeling a bit like Barbaro on my run this morning as I retwisted my bad ankle. It was just when I was getting up to a good speed too. At first I took a couple tentative steps, and immediately though, "Awesome, I can walk!" And I went ahead and ran a mile before it started to really bother me. On the walk back to my apartment, I was thinking maybe I should have just stopped when I initially twisted it. I could feel my ankle swelling. It wasn't like body expanding, just my ankle brace getting tighter. Now having iced it, it seems to be okay...just a little more sore than usual. I will live to run another day. |
Yea, good news! We found a spot in the base day care system. They said there weren't any openings until October, but I guess some spots opened up sooner than they expected. The ratio is 1 to 1 in the infant room. And the best part: because it is government subsidized, we only pay $570 a month!! Yea! That's like $700 less than what we were budgeting for, so that's just awesome! Oh, I'm so relieved, so happy! That leaves one less thing I have to do before I go back to work on the 31st. The main thing is to go to the uniform store and get something that fits. Technically I can wear my maternity uniform up to four months after I give birth, but who wants to do that? The thing would be falling off of me anyway. So I really need to just buy something new...and I better do that tomorrow or Monday because it will probably need to be hemmed. I think I'm going to start working 0630 to 1430. I am a morning person, and my office starts off pretty early anyway. I would rather get there before everyone else. Not only do I have a chance to get myself set up before people come to me with crises, but I also get there before my boss which is always a good thing. I'm kind of excited about getting back into working. I don't know why. I was so frazzled by the time I started my maternity leave. Maybe I've had just enough of a break to satisfy myself. One definite bad part about going back to work - I won't be able to blog as much. I've gotten addicted to it over the last couple of weeks. It's just so easy to record your random thoughts. Oh well... I would probably just want to complain about work all day, so it's probably good I don't have access to the website at work. |
Chris has a family history of high blood pressure so there's a lot of stuff we try to stay away from. We try to cut a lot of sodium and salt from our diet as well as unnecessary preservatives by eating fresh foods. We rarely eat at fast food restaurants. But one of the biggest sacrifices for both of us has been caffeine. I mean, we were straight up addicts last year probably due to all the late nights playing World of Warcraft.  We were addicted to WoW also, but we have sworn that off also...at least until stupid Blizzard releases their expansion to the game.But anyway, this morning Chris woke up craving some coffee, and so we broke tradition and made some. I was going to pass, but it smelled SO GOOD. Made me think of the law school days when I would have like 8 cups daily. Hehehe... So I had a small cup. It was lovely. Maybe we should pick up some decaf coffee at the store Sunday, so I can enjoy the taste but not have to worry about the caffeine. Funny how I fall off the caffeine wagon AFTER Jack starts sleeping most of the night. He had another wonderful night. He woke up once at 2am for a bottle, but quickly went back to sleep. I could tell he was kind of waking on and off from 5-7, but he wasn't fussing, just batting his crib toy around. So yesterday wasn't an anomaly. |
| Chris asked me to read Orwell's 1984. It's one of his favorite books, and I have never gotten through it. So I started it again. This is a quote from the beginning of the book about writing a diary. I thought it was interesting, and it made me think about why I journal. For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. I kept a diary for years and years in college, and then stopped during my divorce. I think it was because my ex-husband found, read, and deleted all my journals. Up until then I thought they were sacred. I wanted them to last forever, and they didn't. I still miss not having those journals. I'm not sure why I started another one. I really do want them to be available to my children or at least to myself in a few decades. In addition to my poetry, most of which thankfully survived my ex-husband's destruction of the written word, it is the best chronicle of my life. I wish I had access to more personal thoughts and testaments that my ancestors wrote. Of course, I love genealogy. Not everyone in my family gets into it as much as I do, although they are interested after I do all the research and show them the results. Chris's dad is adopted, so my genealogical research for Jack will only ever be 75% complete. I actually struggled with that for a long time. Weird, huh? I can't believe how much that bothered me, and now it doesn't seem like such a big deal. |
Jack slept from 7pm until 0330. It was unbelievable! We literally didn't believe it. I woke up at 2am just to make sure he was still alive. I was like, "No way he could go that long without eating...even though I do every night." Hehehe... I guess that means he growing up. I see him trying to roll over now and then. And then there are his attempts to suck his thumb. He's not so good at that. Well, maybe he's good at it, but just prefers his binky. He is a binky fiend. Sometimes when he's done with his bottle, he wants his binky immediately afterwards or he'll start fussing. The best is when he tries to talk and suck his binky at the same time. When he starts learning words I guess he'll figure out you will have to take the binky out to be understood. |
The stuff with Israel and Lebanon lately is really scaring me. Something's different between this and Iraq and Afghanistan for me. It's like when other people start their own wars, all bets are off. Maybe I'm fooling myself thinking we ever had any control in Iraq, but this time I definitely think things are spiraling out of our hands. It bothers me to hear people talk like Gingrich was this morning on the news...saying we should just keep fighting. I personally wouldn't want to negotiate with terrorists like Hezbollah, but the fact is we don't have the resources to keep fighting. They are sending Navy people over to Iraq now to take Army jobs, and all sorts of crazy stuff. We're spending tons and tons of money already. We pretty much fund Israel and their war. *sigh* I can't believe there are nearly 8000 Americans in Beirut. You would think the president would want a cease fire at least to get civilians and American citizens out of the city. BUT nooooo... If Iran is pulled in, they might do a stop-loss on the Navy which means Chris and I might not be able to get out like we want to next year. That would really piss me off! Iran has a Navy and could block off the Persian Gulf to us, and the Navy would have to do something about that. So there would be more Navy involvement if Iran was involved...and probably more if Syria was involved because they have such a long coastline. I guess that wouldn't be too bad. I would SO MUCH rather be on a ship than in the sand in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Yes, we still have troops in Afghanistan, believe it or not.) It will be interesting going back to work in a week or so. I wonder if I was kidnapped with some other military officer, if America would go to war and bomb the hell out of some country for me. Probably not. I've already been to the Middle East. Can't we go to war somewhere else? |
I went running this morning. It was awesome!! I started running again last week in the afternoon after Chris got home, but the heat wave and 100-degree temps has made it hard the past two days to do that. So since Jack had his 0430 bottle and was down in his crib again, I decided to go for a short run. Lovely!! The weather was perfect! I mean, you could tell it was going to be a hot, humid day but at the moment it was a cool 75 degrees. My legs moved so well. Like a well-oiled machine. Even my sprained ankle was finally feeling better. The swelling has gone down since starting to run actually because I'm wearing my brace more, icing it more...and I think the running is actually making my ankle stronger. I don't have the endurance I used to, but my body is remembering how to do this. It reminded me of Pensacola. Back in the day when G'Sgt Reyes got us up at 0500 for a 5 miler. The exhaustion and pain mixed with the elation that I was actually accomplishing something. The best part was when we were done after the cool-down stretches. All hot and sweaty we would double-time to the chow hall, and the air conditioning would hit you like a wall upon entering, nearly freezing your PT gear to your body. I could never eat much more than cereal and a bit of egg, preferring a light meal after exercise. But the guys were ravenous. A whole table full of them, bald heads bowed over trays piled with as much food as they could coax out of the chow hall ladies, stuffing their faces as fast as they could before we had to head to the showers. Hehehe...thinking about OCS makes me laugh. (Even now, after three years Chris and I try to remember all of the dumb chow hall procedures we had to learn. Chris is better at it than me because he was our section leader for like two weeks, so he had to have them memorized.) And before that was Quantico - the all girl platoon I was in at Marine Corps OCS. In the end I'm glad I went with the Navy, but nothing beats a barbed wire obstacle course or the log run over fallen logs. The Marine PT was so much fun! Plus you get to carry a M16 around all over the place. Believe it or not, I can still disassemble and reassemble one of those bad boys. Ah...endorphins...the running high still hasn't faded... Plus when you run in the morning the animals are out. I saw a bunch of bunny rabbits, a deer, and of course tons and tons of birds. The bird watching on this particular trail is spectacular. The only down side to running in the morning is the breasts. I mean, I pumped some milk before I started, but I'm just so full in the morning they still felt kind of sore. Oh well... I've lost 8 lbs since starting to run last week. 10 more pounds and I think I'll be able to fit into my uniform. It was always a little big on me. |
| Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine when I'm reading poetry - people who alter normal English syntax to make it fit a rhyme scheme. Unless you have like perfect rhythm, it usually makes it sound really really awkward. Plus it's a poetic cliche. My favorite offenders are the people who put verbs at the end of the sentence like we speak German or Yoda-nese. I can rhyme not make. Take up Latin - about syntax not worry. Free verse FOREVER!! |
| So we decided we couldn't have the crib in our room anymore because every one's on a different sleeping schedule. It amounts to Chris taking care of Jack the first half of the night, and me taking care of Jack the second half of the night. And Jack just does whatever. Having decided we need to start letting Jack put himself back to sleep if he wakes up, we need to be able to let him fuss a little bit without someone hovering nearby. This just doesn't work when people are trying to sleep in the same room. Moving the crib out of our room isn't as simple as you might think. With only a two bedroom apartment stuffed to the gills with all of our crap, this amounts to moving just about everything around. Our second bedroom was our home office, now it's the baby's room. The home office was moved to the dining room, and the dining room table was moved to the living room which has to be shuffled about a bit to fit it in. It's a little complicated, and the place is still a mess. Good news: We got a call from the day care center on the army base saying they got an opening for Jack starting Aug 1st. Yea! We weren't entirely sure how the day care situation was going to work. I think Chris is still going to take leave and hang out at home 1st-14th of Aug, but it's nice to know we got a plan for after that. BTW, it's friggin HOT in Maryland. 106 heat index today! WTF? I guess that's what July is all about. |
| I have begun looking into sending stuff to people to see about getting it published. I always look into this stuff, and then get distracted and never do it. Really I need to suspend my disbelief. I don't think I'll ever really have anything accepted and so decide that it's not worth pursuing. It's the whole "time is money" concept. If I'm never going to make money off of it, what's the point. Of course, there's so many flaws in this thinking, I'm not even going to point them out. Mostly I'm lazy. If I really followed the "time is money" line of thinking, I wouldn't play so many video games. Or write at all...let alone send pieces to journals etc. So we'll see what happens. We'll see if I actually follow through and put something in the mail this time. |
| Until now I only half-believed being a mom was a full-time job. I know, I know...it's taboo to say that sort of thing, but seriously when I was in college I was like, "yeah, yeah, whatever..." Well, I have been humbled. I mean, maybe it changes when you're kids get older and more independent, but definitely when they're babies. Goodness! They're attention hogs. Now I know why so many people watch daytime television too. I mean, come on, what is entertaining to an infant is not always entertaining to you. It's nice to have something to watch or listen to when I'm feeding Jack or burping him or changing his diaper...any number of those things. We have to get Jack used to his crib. We're so used to just letting him sleep wherever he falls asleep...which is more often than not somewhere outside the crib. It's a bad habit, I know, but one of convenience. Tonight, though, we put him in his crib and after an hour of fussing he fell asleep. Maybe this won't be as hard as we thought. *fingers crossed* |
| Yesterday I drove an hour and a half through rush-hour traffic on the DC beltway with a screaming infant to get to a 0900 doctor's appt which was actually scheduled for today. *groan* It was not a good day! Luckily it went much better today. Jack slept through most of the traffic and all of the appt. I got a clean bill of health from the doctor. She said that I'm doing good with the weight loss and that I should be good to go to start exercising again. To celebrate I went for a run today. *groan* I'm so out of shape! It didn't help that my sprained ankle is still a little swollen and it was 90 degrees outside. I made it about a mile before I started to get tunnel vision and thought I should better stop. No need to get heat exhaustion. Chris says I am doing fine just starting out slow. There's no need to rush. And he's right of course... It's just that I won't be able to outrun the genetically modified super zombies.  |
| Get this - I'm right-breasted. My right breast makes twice as much milk as my left. I wonder why that is. Is this connected to the left hemisphere in my brain? If I haven't pumped any milk in a long time (6 hrs), my boobs will actually be lop-sided because one has produced so much more than the other. The human body is WEIRD!! Jack has started "talking" now. Instead of crying all the time, you can tell he's trying to communicate with coos and grunts. It's funny especially when he is trying to talk to his stuffed animals or to his reflection in the mirror. Another talent that really blows my mind is when he raises one eyebrow. I don't know about the rest of the world, but for me it's not easy to raise one eyebrow without the other. Jack does it all the time when he's trying to figure something out. It's a hilarious facial expression on a baby. He's definitely getting most of his sleep at night now. He may take a couple cat naps (30 mins) during the day but he pretty much sleeps from 1900-0700 non-stop (except when he gets up to eat). It's nice because Chris and I actually aren't too sleep-deprived. However, this also means that we have to worry about keeping him occupied all day. This task requires being able to read him properly. You can kind of tell if he wants to move around and it's time for a walk or if he just wants to lay on his back and talk to his animal toys. If you do things in the wrong order, he won't be happy. I keep having weird baby dreams. Last night I dreamt I lost Jack in downtown Manhattan (where I have never been before). The night before that I dreamt I accidentally dropped him in the water while on vacation at Ocean City. Crazy! I wonder if I'm feeling insecure about being able to protect my baby or something. God only knows! |
| Jack is one month old today. Yea! I feel like I am finally getting the hang of this. I love how at first you don't have any idea, but you learn really quickly. The plight of the firstborn! Hehehe... He's eating a lot and when we last attempted to measure his weight on our bathroom scale, he measured around 10 pounds. It's amazing how fast they grow. Everyone still says he looks small, but to me he already seems to have gotten much bigger. His neck muscles are getting very strong. He can hold his head at 90 degrees for a few seconds, and does like mini push-ups when he's on his stomach. This kind of play really tires him out though. He doesn't sleep through the night. The max amount he can sleep is about 4 hrs. HOWEVER, he does sleep at night. He has figured out that you don't play at 0300, which was a point of confusion a couple weeks ago. Now he plays most of the morning and a little bit in the evening time, takes a long nap in the afternoon and sleeps most of the night (except when he gets up to eat obviously). Speaking of play, he actually does play. It used to be when he was awake he just wanted to stare at my face or at the wall or something. He still likes doing that, but now I can put him down on his play mat and he'll bat at the swinging animals and be perfectly happy for up to 20 mins...long enough for me to pump some breast milk. It's nice. I'd say things are going wonderfully! I can't wait to start running again. I'm supposed to wait another two weeks for the doctor's approval. I think that is total rubbish as I feel just fine now. After all, they only ask you to wait four weeks to have sex, and that seems like it would be just as hard on your body. Did that already too btw, and it was great to feel capable of that level of intimacy - a hard thing to do when you're the size of a whale. I gained a total of 60 lbs during pregnancy, which seems like a lot, but it's not too bad. I've already lost half of that. I weigh what I weighed in college, and I lost that with diet and exercise. I'm pretty certain I can do so again no problem. I am already planning on joining the gym at work when I get off maternity leave. I'm just bummed that I can't run with Chris now.  Someone has to be with the baby, and those runner strollers are like $300 or something ridiculous. Meh! |
| Since switch over to the bottle we noticed that Jack was eating so quickly he couldn't keep it down sometimes. And when I say "couldn't keep it down" I don't mean a little spit up. I mean, Exorcist vomit from nose and mouth everything he just ate. This is not only alarming, but also a little annoying because then you are dealing with (1) a big mess and (2) a very cranky baby who is still hungry because his stomach is empty again. After this happened a few times, we decided to reevaluate our choice of bottles. We were using Avent which is probably a very wonderful bottle, but obviously not working for us. We went to Target and bought one of each other kind of bottle. We had Playtex, Evenflo, Soothie, Dr Brown's, and of course Avent. When we got home we lined them all up, watched the drip from each of them, tested them ourselves. After careful consideration, we determined that Dr Brown's had the slowest flow and was the least likely to choke our baby. So since switching we haven't had any incidents. But then we also started feeding him slower. We make him stop for a minute or two after each ounce or so. He doesn't necessarily like this, but it seems to be giving his stomach the time it needs to work the milk through his system. |
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But I am happy about those Cardinals! The same Cardinals that I'd written off as possibly the worst playoff contestant in history just three weeks ago. Now look at 'em! I'll be pulling for them in the Big Game!
Tuesday would have been my last day until I turned 18.