Category: whine whine whine

It’s better now

Today Mimi is 4 weeks old! The first two weeks dragged by in a haze of sleeplessness and soreness but the last few weeks have gone by in a blink. I actually thought Mimi was only 3 weeks old until I checked the calendar. The first week or so after my c-section was pretty rough in terms of pain but except for a little tenderness at my incision I’m feeling pretty good now.

Even though I breastfed E and thought nursing would go more smoothly this time around it the first couple of weeks were a struggle. Along with Mimi’s prodigious size comes a prodigious appetite and for a while she had trouble getting enough milk when nursing. I had enough milk she just couldn’t get it out. So I would pump some milk or give her formula in a bottle after each feeding to top her off.

When she was a week old I took Mimi to the lactation clinic and they couldn’t figure out what wasn’t working so they suggested putting away the bottles and using a little neonatal feeding tube connected to a syringe of breastmilk. Basically I would tape the end of the tube to my (clean) finger and then stick my finger in her mouth and slowly press the syringe plunger down as Mimi sucked. The theory behind it is that feeding her this way is closer to breastfeeding than using a bottle and that it would help her learn to suck more effectively.

I fed her like that after every feeding for about three days like the consultant suggested. It was kind of a production: the syringe only held 10 cc and Mimi would need three or four of them after she nursed to feel full. And then two hours later I would have to start the 45 minute process again. After four days of using the syringe I went back to giving her a bottle if she was still hungry. And then after a few more days Mimi seemed to get the hang of it and was able to nurse until she was full at every feeding.

Before I had E I didn’t realize that breastfeeding could be so difficult. And before I had Mimi I didn’t realize that the first few weeks of nursing could be difficult even if you’ve done it before. In the middle of our struggles I would get discouraged and feel like it was NEVER going to to get better.

But then it did.

(Phew.)

The Everything Slow Cooker Cookbook

This week I decided to make something from The Everything Slow Cooker Cookbook since it was kind of a hectic week with the last day of photo class. (By the way, thanks for the feedback on my photos!)

What should have been an easy dump-it-in-and-forget-it-experience went awry when on Wednesday morning I pulled out the roast I had just bought on Tuesday afternoon only to discover that it had turned rancid. N smelled it himself and confirmed it so it wasn’t just my wacky pregnant sense of smell. By the time I bought a new roast and returned the bad one to the store it was already after 2pm. And it was supposed to cook for at least 8 hours.

Add to that E had been in rare form all day due to teething and I was ready to call it a day. So I stubbornly popped the roast in at 2:30 pm and informed N that I thought we should order pizza for dinner after E went to bed and that we’d have the beef the following night. So last night after I got home from class we had the sandwiches which were pretty good (if a little heavy on the liquid smoke.) And E LOVED the meat and ate a whole bowl of it for dinner which is awesome.

Texas Barbecued Beef Sandwiches

Ingredients

  • 4-pound chuck roast
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 2 cups ketchup
  • 10 oz cola
  • 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 T prepared mustard
  • 1 T liquid smoke
  • 1/4 cup Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce

Instructions

  1. Cover and cook the roast with the water in the slow cooker on high setting for 8 hours, or until tender
  2. Remove the roast. Shred the meat, trimming off the fat and discarding it in the process. Place the shredded meat in the slow cooker along with ketchup, cola, Worcestershire sauce. Mustard, liquid smoke, and hot sauce. Cook covered on high setting for 1 hour. Ladle over buns to serve.

The Verdict
3 (out of 5 stars). If you’re looking for a book containing the slow cooker dishes you remember your mom making when you were a kid this will do nicely. It covers main dishes, appetizers, soups, etc… More puzzlingly it also includes a chapter on bread(apparently you bake it inside a #2 coffee can inside the cooker). Recipes heavily rely on pre-prepared ingredients such as ketchup and canned goods but for me part of the joy of slow cooking is just being able to dump everything in. However, it seemed like many of the recipes are variations of the same.

It seems like many of the recipes aren’t that great, health-wise (high in sodium and fat) but nutritional info isn’t included. Photos are also missing but that probably helped keep the list price down. If you don’t have a slow cooker cookbook you can probably find most of the usable recipes at allrecipes.com or someplace else online.

Ennui

Maybe it’s just the summer doldrums but there’s a definite feeling of ennui around here. It’s not that I don’t have anything to do–I have a good 15 hours worth of work to do before now and Monday and as always my house could use a good de-cluttering it’s just…bleh.

I went to the grocery store yesterday with a list of ingredients for a Cookbooks on Trial recipe and then FORGOT THE MAIN INGREDIENT ANYWAY–so frustrating. We’re planning on going to see Beirut perform tonight for the free Twilight Concert Series so I don’t think I’ll cook it tonight. But I don’t want to skip another week. Maybe I’ll make it Friday night and just post it late? We’ll see.

Down and Out

Last night was somewhat eventful around here in a minor injury/illness way. E woke up from his nap feeling feverish and out of sorts. He didn’t want dinner but we offered him a banana which he took a few bites of and a little juice.

I was standing in the kitchen chatting with N while he did the dishes when I heard a suspicious-sounding cough from the family room where E was watching Wonder Pets. I peeked down the stairs just in time to see him lean against the couch and puke all over it. I ran down the stairs to help him but kind of forgot about that pesky bottom step and launched myself gracefully into the air where I landed flat on my face and on my left shoulder and elbow.

N ran downstairs too (notably more successfully than I did) and helped E while I rolled around on the floor groaning melodramatically for a minute. After I collected myself we gave E a bath and washed the couch’s cushion covers.

E went to bed okay but was up from about 3 to 4:30 in the morning. He was super thirsty and wanted something to drink but it didn’t stay down. So I gave up trying to keep him in his room and plopped him down in front of the tv so I could clean up the puke on his floor with him out of the way. Fortunately after everything was cleaned up he went right back to bed.

So that’s where we are this morning. My shoulder is pretty jacked up–I can’t really lift my arm above my head–and I’m sporting an awesome scraped elbow which hurts more than I remember them hurting when I was eleven.

E obviously can’t go to preschool this morning which means that I can’t go into the office like I was planning. So today we’ll be rocking it at home in our pajamas and I’ll try and get some work done when he naps *crosses fingers*.

Sometimes it’s hard


E came down with a stomach bug over the weekend which I also caught. I’m better now but E still has a low fever and a cough. He’s been spending a lot of time draping himself over the couch and/or bursting into tears.

My stomach still isn’t back to 100% and I have been eating very much but for some reason this morning a fried egg (with a deliciously runny yolk) over rice sounded good to me. So I fried up an egg on the stove.

E loves helping to cook and dragged a chair over to the stove to watch. While I let him sprinkle some salt and pepper on the egg I reminded him that “This egg is for Mama; E can’t eat eggs because they will make him sick.” He’s usually pretty good about listening when we tell him that certain foods will make him sick and doesn’t insist on eating them.

But today, for whatever reason, he really wanted to try the egg. I gave him a few bites of rice but he kept pointing to the egg and saying “try it!” He had a full-blown sobbing meltdown and I ended up scraping my food into the trash because I felt horrible for eating it in front of him. And then I felt like crying.

I know that his food allergies are a minor thing as health issues go but I really wish he could eat eggs, drink milk, and have a peanut butter sandwich like a normal kid.

Epic Parenting FAIL

On Saturday night N and I went out with our friends Kristin and Ryan to dinner and to see Kick A**. I wanted to see it because I like kung fu movies, super heroes, nerdy kids, and 11 year-old girls swearing like sailors (just kidding!). But seriously, I read the reviews beforehand so I knew what type of movie I was going to go see. The movie was for the most part well-made and I liked it but it’s definitely not a kids’ movie. I think 16 is probably even too young in most cases. It’s not even a movie for squeamish adults.

Which was why I did a double take when I walked in the theater and saw a family sitting down with their approximately 9 year-old son. And then when the movie was over a mom walked passed us with her 6 year-old daughter! Who DOES THAT? Either the parents were totally clueless about what the movie was going to be like (in which case they should have walked out when the realized their mistake) or they they were simply too lazy to arrange babysitting. Way to traumatize your kids!

I try not to be judgmental regarding other parents (I have plenty of weaknesses of my own) but parents taking their kids to see age-inappropriate movies is a huge pet peeve of mine. Once they’re at a movie kids are a captive audience and it’s part of your job as a parent to make sure what they’re watching isn’t going to freak them out or damage them.

Epic parenting FAIL!

From the front door

I know I shouldn’t have, but I totally got suckered in by the very nice spring-like weather we had all week. I had heard that we were supposed to get snow but deep down I didn’t really believe it–it was nice enough yesterday that I took E to a park and he probably didn’t even need a jacket.

So I was still surprised to wake up to this today. I shouldn’t have been, it’s happened before and I’m sure it will happened again, but…


Utah, why must you break my heart like this? You’re such a tease.

Oh well, at least they already plowed.

Weekly Menu FAIL

Up until last night the whole weekly-menu-thing was going pretty well. Even though I was tired by the time I got home at 8:45 pm on Tuesday from helping out with a church youth activity I sucked it up and made the roasted shrimp and broccoli dish I had planned (I know, right? SO brave.) And I really appreciated getting home from woodworking class on Wednesday night at 9:40 and being able to eat the delicious chicken cacciatore that N had made instead of Del Taco drive-thru which used to be our usual post-woodworking-class meal.

But last night, the night I was supposed to make teriyaki chicken and salad with homemade dressing (ah, such arrogance!) was the night that the menu broke down. Notice it wasn’t on one of N’s nights; even though he has a demanding job as a corporate lawyer he still managed to cook two healthy dinners this week. Nope, it was me who caved at 9:05 last night and ordered pizza.

Granted, yesterday was a really hard day: I had been working on my big quarterly presentation and they shifted some deadlines and told me yesterday morning that I needed to have a big chunk of it finished by 9:00 last night instead of on Monday like I had been expecting. Plus E has caught his 26th cold of the season (I blame preschool) and was super whiny yesterday and threw himself on the floor and cried at the drop of a hat and he only took a 30-minute nap.

I took a clear-eyed look at everything that was going on and realized that there was no way I would be able to take care of little E, get dinner over to my friend Emily’s house at a reasonable hour, and then get back home and finish my work by 9 . Yes, that’s right. I didn’t just flake on making dinner for my family, I flaked on making dinner for another family, a family who just had a new baby a couple weeks ago (oy vay!). So yesterday I spent a few minutes gathering up my courage/fighting my embarrassment and called Emily and asked if I could bring dinner over on Friday instead of Thursday. She was very nice about it but I felt like the world’s worst friend.

N was a trooper and as soon as he got home he took E off my hands so I could finish my work. I emailed my report in at 9:00 pm and ordered a pizza at 9:02 pm. N was very gracious about the whole thing. I still have a lot of work to do today on the next stage of my presentation but I’ll have enough time to make dinner tonight.

On a fairly-related note, I think I’m going to scale back the frequency of my posts here. There are several things in my life that I need to be spending more time on, mostly E and work and up-keeping my house which is threatening to reach a Hoarders-level of clutter. Once I get my crap under a bit of control I’ll probably go back to posting everyday. But as for right now it’s become a bit of a stretch to find the time to post or to think of things to post about. I still love blogging and I still thrive on structure so instead of posting on every weekday I think I’ll switch to posting on Monday/Wednesdays/Fridays and see how it goes. I hope you’ll still stick around.

Bleh

Not much is going on here. E has come down with his second stomach bug in as many weeks. He threw up again last Saturday and since then has been running a fever which means I’ve been stuck in sick-baby jail on and off for almost two weeks now. I’m starting to get a bit stir crazy and my patience, while never that of a saint, is wearing thin. On Sunday I lost my temper at E’s constant whining and yelled at him to “stop whining!” (Mother-of-the-year!) Predictably enough, yelling did not work to make either E or myself feel better. I felt horrible about losing my temper with poor sick pitiful E.

But when E’s sitting on my lap and resting his feverish little head against my cheek all I think about is how much I love him and how grateful I am to be blessed with the resources and ability to take care of him and protect him from harm.

As graceful as always

I almost forgot to post today. I’ve been in a bit of a funk since this morning when, carrying E, I slipped on the ice outside of his daycare and fell. My right knee and elbow took the blunt of the fall but poor E fell on his back and bonked his head lightly. It freaked him out quite a bit and upset me too. I felt horrible about dropping E (mother-of-the-year!) and then really embarrassed since my graceful landing was witnessed by several people who then kept asking if I was all right. Le sigh.

Also, E ate a chicken nugget at daycare that contained something he was allergic to and so when I came to pick him up the skin around one of his eyes was red and covered with little hives. But on the plus side, he was still having fun playing with the toys and didn’t want to leave. I gave him a teaspoon of Benadryl right away and in about an hour and after a bath he was back to normal. When I had dropped him off I had asked the cook to check the ingredients of the nuggets for milk and eggs so I’m not quite sure where the breakdown occurred, but obviously something went wrong. The next time I drop him off I’m going to bring a bag of E-safe chicken nuggets for the daycare to keep in their freezer and feed to E if there’s any doubt about the food they’re serving that day in the future.

I know it’s wasn’t like anything super traumatic or even horrible happened today but I still feel like I’ve been put through a wringer. (Because I am a delicate flower like that.) So it’s nice that I have an outing scheduled with some girlfriends tonight for dinner and some Christmas shopping. I’m still a little concerned about E’s reaction. If E was going to be left with a sitter I would probably cancel but since N will be home so I can go out without feeling burdened by worry.

Now I just have to go clean my house like mad before my friends show up.