Something I never thought I’d have to do

So I'm going back to school in September. I'm half way through my degree and I'd kinda like to have it finished by the time the kids are both old enough to be in school. I can totally manage to do this by going to school two days a week. My day is full but it's do-able.

 

My problem is finding child care.

Well sorta. See I managed to swing it that one of my days is the day the hubs has off. So theoretically he can watch the kids that day. The other day I have it so that my mother is going to be watching them.

The problem comes in there. If she has a meeting on that day we're hooped. She doesn't have control of when she has to go to meetings. Now hubs is home until mid morning that day so if she can wrangle only early morning meetings we are golden.

 

But just in case I want a back up.

 

I've been phoning day care's like crazy.

Do you know how hard it is to find space for a two year old for only two days a week?

Nobody wants to have a toddler part timer. It's awful. I've phoned over thirty places, and only two have bothered to answer/call me back. Awesome.

 

I have mommy friends, but I really don't want to make them have to deal with my hyperactive, slightly destructive son, especially since the majority of them have younger children.

I also think that it would be a really good thing for the Sprogling to have a chance to interact with other children and have an adult that isn't family in charge.

 

Now if only someone will call me back.

My Greatest Joy

My greatest joy these days is getting to do things by myself. Like go to the bathroom. Or eat a complete meal.

As a parent, all that you have becomes joint property with your children (at least in their minds). I am no longer allowed to have an entire drink all by myself. I have little grubby hands reaching for it before I even have the first sip.

It has been two years since I was allowed to go to the bathroom by myself without listening to a child scream. My son's favourite game to play is to pound on the bathroom door and jiggle he handle. Our main bathroom doesn't lock securely so if you put enough weight on it, it swings open. Hurrah. Just want, shrieking, giggling toddler when I'm sitting on the toilet.

The other thing I haven't been able to do in over a year is eat by myself. If I dare grab myself something to snack on that hasn't already been offered to the Sprogling, then heaven help me. I actually hid from my son the other day so that I could eat my breakfast in peace.

I fed him and his sister, plopped them both down in the living room to play and then subtly wandered back to the kitchen. I made myself a bowl of terribly healthy cereal and sat down to eat. It was at that moment that I heard silence from the living room. I grabbed my bowl and sat down on the floor behind our island counter. I heard the pitter pat of toddler feet and then "Mama? MAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaama?" The Sprogling hung over our gate for a couple minutes and then went back to the living room.

I got to eat the entire bowl by myself, I didn't have to share, and I only had to hide on the floor of my kitchen to do so. A whole five minutes by myself without children crying or grabbing at me.

 

Pure Bliss.

Celebrating average-ness

Little Bit was born small. She only came in at 6 lbs and then lost weight during the next day, to the extent that the doctors got a wee bit worried.

She managed to stay ill for the next month or so and we were in and out of the hospital or seeing nurses or doctors every single day. The more callous ones started bandying about sentences like "Failure to thrive" and other equably terrifying things.

For the first six months of her life she mainly came in under the 15^th percentile on the growth charts. We knew she was growing well but every time we met a new doctor they would put us through our paces and tell us she was small for her age or that we weren't feeding her enough or the correct formula (because I wasn't producing enough mama milk).

Well after we started feeding her solids, things started turning around. She started putting on the pounds. Rapidly.

She is now my little chunky monkey and now at 8 months she weighs in at 18 lbs on the dot.

 

She is on the 50^th percentile for height and the 50^th percentile for weight.

 

Utterly average and utterly perfect.

My experiments in cake decorating

So yesterday for the Sprogling's birthday, I got a crazy idea. Instead of buying him a cake from the grocery store, I was going to make him one!

What a fantastic idea! The two year old would surely appreciate the time and effort going into his cake. Suuuuure.

But anyways I went ahead and bought things to accomplish this. My mother had picked up a cake tin in the shape of that really popular car that Disney is pushing right now. I pulled that out, read the oh so helpful instructions on decorating the end cake and went out bought the icing tips I would need, as well as super fancy food dye.

Get it all home and bake the cake. It works out well. Chocolate because the Sprogling doesn't have an opinion on flavours yet and I like chocolate.

I let that cool down and make the icing. I follow the darn instructions down to sifting the stupid icing sugar one cup at a time and I used my super duper fancy mixer. I get watery (tasty!) icing. Nothing that is going to let me decorate the cake.

This is about 4:30. Dinner is due at 5:30.

I make an emergency call to the Hubs to run and grab premade icing on his way home from work, pretty please or I swear I'm going to have a meltdown, OK!

He comes home at 4:45 with 4 extra big tins of icing and a big hug for me. Crisis averted.

I mix up the icing with the colours. Oh the colours. Did I mention that they stain? Everything? My hands still look like I may have been slaughtering small animals behind my house yesterday just for laughs, but that's beside the point.

I start icing, and I'm actually doing well! I have never in my life iced a cake any fancier than slopping on as much icing as possible and smoothing it out with a knife. Or writing "Happy Birthday XXX" on it with those gel type icing tubes.

I manage to get through the whole entire cake down to the part where I put the numbers on the side of the car. This is the very last step. My husband comes in and tells my I'm doing really well. I turn to smile at him and give him a quick kiss and manage to slop the icing down where I was about to meticulously place it in the lines of the numbers. I try to make it look as good as possible and then give up.

The Sprogling's two. As long as the icing is made with sugar and not spinach he doesn't care at all. He will not care if you cannot read the numbers. And oh yah, he can't read.

He had two helpings and got to eat with his hands. The cake was a success.

The Sprogling is TWO!

Tomorrow at about 2 my Sprogling turns two years old. There was a time about four years ago that I would never ever have a child, so this is incredibly big. TWO! How the heck did that happen?

So in honour of this momentous occasion, here is his birth story. Cause everyone wants to read about amniotic fluid and placentas!

My waters had broken the morning of the fifth but as we had gone into the hospital the night before for a false alarm, I didn't want to go in and get told that we were wrong again. So we postponed and procrastinated all day long. I spent half the day wandering around IKEA, leaking fluid. I can tell you, you have never lived until you've had to use the IKEA bathroom twice in one visit to change your pad. So we mostly walked around and shopped until at about 11 we went to grab some donuts (last minute craving) and when we got back discovered I had soaked through a pad, my underwear, my pants and most of the car seat. So at that point we decided there could be no doubt that it was real and we headed to the hospital.

We were admitted and sat in the Triage for a bit. A very very nice resident came and checked me out and confirmed that my membranes had indeed ruptured so he went to talk to the OB on call about what to do with me. It had almost been 24 hours, the magic number that they wait for labour to induce you after your membranes rupture so they really didn't want me going home. They said that I should probably walk around for a bit to see if we could make the small contractions that I was having increase and become consistent.

That meant that I wasn't allowed to go home. This wasn't really part of our plan. We had figured that they wouldn't want us there and that we would get to go home and come back in the morning, but no such luck.

We were taken to a Labour and Delivery room and at that point the other OB on call came in and decided that they didn't want to take the risk of my labour not starting quick enough so they hooked me up to an i.v. and started Oxytocin. This was also not part of our plan. It meant that I was tied to the bed and fetal monitors. No walking, no real moving and no going to the bathroom without a lot of unhooking by the nurses. So it was about 2 in the morning by this point so we tried to get some sleep. Not really happening, but we tried.

So fast forward through an awkward night of not much sleep and we arrive at 7:30 Monday morning and the nurses change over and my mother arrives with food for Rob. Did I mention that I wasn't allowed to eat anything in the off chance that I had to go to the operating room? Yah... sucky. The last thing I ate was a Timbit at 11 the night before.

We had the nicest nurses ever. We were lucky and had two devoted just to us as one was new and from Ontario and the other was observing/teaching her. By this point, what had been basically no labour at all turned into OH MY GOD! every two minutes for 50 seconds at a time. They were right on top of each other and to make matters worse, every second one or so was making me puke. At that point the very kind nurse S asked if maybe, even though she knew it wasn't part of my birth plan, because yes, she had read it, but maybe did I wanted an epidural? Now, yes an epidural wasn't on my plan, but neither was being induced. So I made a decision and the lovely anaesthesiologist, Dr. K became my new best friend. I was able to sleep finally after that and slept till about 11. Doctors came in and checked me and I was at about 6 centimetres and the baby was facing to the left side.

I was awake and active after that. Played some cards with my mother and chatted with the nurses and Rob. They had given me a catheter, but unfortunately due to all the UTI's I had as a teen it hurt like a mother. Even through the epidural. So they took it out and it turned out I was able to walk still. Needed help but could walk with the epidural. The nurses kept telling me that I wasn't supposed to be able to do that as I hadn't gotten a walking epidural, but there you go. I got up to pee at about 12:30. That went well until I got up to go back and at that point I started puking again. Apparently if you start puking and bleeding (which I was) there is a good chance that your fully dilated. So the doctors came back in and lo and behold I had dilated the full four centimetres in that hour and the baby had "deflated and turned" so was in the correct position. Hoorah!

So from about 1:30 on I was pushing. To be perfectly honest I don't remember a whole bunch about this part. I know that another anaesthesiologist came in and topped me up as I was really starting to feel the contractions again and at this point really didn't want to, but mostly I just remember moving into a lot of positions (I think I changed about 5 times) and pushing. The pushing was hard as until about the last 20 pushes or so, as I couldn't feel the contractions at all. It was just pressure. And when the Sprogling's head got far enough down there wasn't a whole lot of difference in the pressure of him and the contraction.

We did just fine until it was actually time to push him out. At that point his head got stuck. The doctor was getting worried as Patrick was getting tired (not to mention me!) and he wanted to do an episiotomy. This at least I got my way. He wasn't putting sharp things anywhere near my girly bits. He kept lying to me and saying one more push, and finally the Sprogling's head was out. Not pushing was actually harder than pushing. After that 3 more pushes and a little wet and squirming body was on my chest. The doctor waited until the cord stopped pulsing before Hubby cut it (this was another request of ours but at that point, if he had cut it early I wouldn't have noticed.)

I was crying and I think at that point it actually became real. Strange that until that moment I had managed to distance myself from what was happening so much that it didn't seem as if the birth was really happening. I cuddled the Sprogling for about 15 minutes than handed him off to the nurses and then Hubby while the placenta was being delivered. After the placenta was out the Doctor set about stitching me up. 15 stitches and second degree lacerations. Ouch.

*********************

So that is the story of the Sprogling's birth. What I didn't put in there is how the nurses both said, separately, that I had the prettiest vajayjay that they had ever seen. Uhm.. Thanks.

It's so hard to remember how very tiny he was and correlate that to the energetic toddler he is today.

My son’s new “toy”

It's hot here. The temperature peaked today at 30C which makes it ridiculously hot for our neck of the woods.

So to combat the heat I have taken to dressing my kids in the minimal amount of clothing socially acceptable. For going out that is usually a little sleeveless dress for Little Bit and a t-shirt and shorts for the Sprogling. When we are home all they wear is diapers. (Did I mention that we only have a very small window air conditioner that my stingy heart only lets me use during the very hottest part of the day?)

It's keeping them nice and cool but we have an unforeseen side effect.

My son has been delighting in taking his diaper off. In and of itself not too bad as we are half heartedly potty training and he doesn't make many messes on the floor. But he has discovered his "doodle".*

So now a common sight in my house is that of the Sprogling sitting on the floor/couch/etc yanking on his doodle.

He would quite happily play with it for hours. And hours.

I mean it's not like he's doing any damage, but it's a little off putting to see my toddler playing with his doodle.

 

 

 

*Yes that is what we call it in our house as I giggle uncontrollably whenever I say the word PENIS and I just can't force myself to say it. That and the Sprogling can almost say "doodle" but doesn't have a snowballs chance of saying penis.