Monday, November 26

Gratitude

Hey Friends, sorry its been slow on the dinobaby updates lately. You know, Holidays.

I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge how extremely blessed I am. I am so grateful to my husband who is my best friend and an unbelievably good spouse. And who makes the money. Although not important to how much I love him, it is fundamental to my life at the moment that he makes money so I can stay home with my baby. No worrying about childcare and dinobaby's wellbeing, and getting to be there with him to watch him grow and just be so gosh darn adorable and a million other reasons. It's awesome. Thank you for being patient and forgiving. And seriously, thank you for not being boring--thanks for seeing all of the little intriguing details in this life. Thank you Adam.

My parents are fantastic. My dad has given me great, big, tight hugs nearly every day of my childhood, and is always willing to offering one to me via phone call or email since I've left home. This is extremely important to me, and I credit my dad that I'm more or less a confident and functionally self-assured adult because ever since I can remember my father has treated me like a competent individual with an opinion that mattered.  My mother is the most genuinely concerned person I have ever seen. She has cradled me in a million and one ways. I have never doubted that I am wanted and loved. And like my husband, although not a factor in my love, my parents have also been a sea wall in my financial life. Sometimes I think I'd be okay without their temporal support, and then disaster hits and I'm so fantastically grateful that they're always willing to help me weather the storm. Thank you Mom and Dad.

My other parents are also pretty much fantastic. They're worth a million dollars because they let me sleep in when I come to visit. I really cannot express how much I appreciate it. I appreciate the open-door invitations and home-cooked meals I don't have to prepare. I'm grateful for the no-fuss acceptance I have in their family. Thank you Melissa and Neal (or Mom and Dad or Gram and Pops or whatever I call you...'cause I'm awkward like that) and thank you for your zen-like calm and benevolent honesty both are infectious and reassuring.

My baby. Thanks for snuggling. For putting your head on my shoulder when you're scared or tired. Thanks being happy all the time. Thanks for being so bright-eyed and alert, and for giggling when I enter the room after I've been gone. Thanks for being a big, chubby, healthy baby. I'm so grateful for you.

Thank you Lord for my degree. It was a miraculously good capstone paper. Thank you for keeping us all healthy-- I know that there are many days that accidents could've happened and didn't. I don't know that that was because of Your blessing, but I don't know that it wasn't. Thank you all the same. Thank you for the right people in the right places. Thank you for being generous with the do-overs, I really mean that I'm not trying to be flippant. And thank you for this gorgeous place you've brought us to.

Happy Thanksgiving!








Tuesday, November 13

8 Months!

Yeah, I know red-eye, but if I waited until I edited the picture you'd never see it, and look how cute he is. (And yes that's a Peruvian flag on the table---the food was fantastic!)

8 Months, holy cow!

Leopleuradon is doing awesome. Healthy and happy. 

Fine Motor: So despite all previous inclinations to do things with his right hand, he now seems to be favoring his left. So who knows, maybe he's a southpaw.  He's nailed the pincer grasp (a month before average). He transfers from hand to hand like a pro and has started to use his hands in concert- holding items in one hand and touching with the index finger of the other. He still very much wants to chew on things, but he has started waving around his index finger at new objects also wanting to touch it.

 

Gross Motor: Crawling is imminent by all guesses (like it has been for months) but no dice yet. Dinobaby appears to be experimenting with all methods of locomotion before mastering any one of them. Hence the picture of the bear crawl. He also loves to stand. To the point that when I try to go sit him down on the floor so I can do something, he'll straight-leg himself, planking from his heels to his neck so that I'll have to stay and help him balance on his feet. He also loves to stand up with his upper body resting on the glider's ottoman so that he can rock back and forth on his feet. He's a goober. 

He also shakes things to make noise and today tried super hard to hit two sticks together, one in each hand. He was marginally successful

Social: Like I said last month, dinobaby also loves to laugh with people. But in the last few weeks he also has a laughing face where he wrinkles his nose and sniffs really fast. It's extremely endearing. He also seems to be overcoming his abject terror at strangers. Still wary, but no crying. It's evolved into alternating between looking out and hiding his face in my shoulder all while have a death grip on my bicep. (Also very endearing)

Language: He has started to babble. He often goes around pseudo biting his bottom lip making a "vvv" and drooling down his chin. He also says "a mam" in a very whiny way when he's frustrated and complaining that we haven't given him the puffs already or sat him up, or let him eat our cellphones, etc. (probably his first word since it's more or less consistent). Other than that, he doesn't actually talk much. 

Cognitive: He has a pretty impressive attention span. I have a box of "supervised" toys that he only plays with when I sit with him. It's a few seashells, a river rock, a house key, a scrap corner of lumber, and some chopsticks. He'll pull all of the items out of the box one by one and explore them for nearly thirty minutes straight. He loves books, and loves to turn the pages. I'm impressed that he knows what to do with them. Although he's a little rough with the paper pages, he's trying to turn them rather than ball them up and eat them like he does with paper outside of books. 

Sleep: I don't want to talk about it. Depending on how you define "sleep through the night" then yes. But if you define it as he goes to sleep and doesn't wake up until he's ready to stay awake for the day then definitely no. However, he's generally out cold between the hours of 11pm and 5am. But his bedtime is 6:30-7, and he wakes up for real at 7am. It's a start.  Naps don't show any signs of spontaneously lengthening. However where in the past dinobaby seemed more or less happy regardless of his 40 minute naps. He is showing signs that they aren't long enough anymore. So, maybe I'll try to do something about that. But man, I really don't want to. 



Loneliness

Loneliness. Usually you can't use the words billion and literally correctly in the same sentence. In fact I'd probably say that if you're using billion, you can rest assured that you're using literally wrong. But, based on the fact that there are 7 billion of us whizzing around the sun right now, half of which are women, and 490 thousand babies born every day, it's probably safe to say that there are literally a billion mothers on Earth if not more.

One billion people more or less sharing the same experience.Yet the consistently hardest thing about being a mom is loneliness.  Not the loneliness of being isolated, though that certainly comes into play when you're only able to communicate with yourself, but I mean the loneliness of experience. 

It's the feeling that creeps into your heart when people coo at your baby and say "8 months?  This such a fun age isn't it?" or you overhear a conversation about "adopting a new kid" that turns out to be a puppy.  It's the loneliness of thinking you're absolutely the only person on the planet that understands your own emotions.  Because yes, 8 months is a fun age. But it'doesn't always feel like it. Sometimes it's so frustrating its nightmarish. And yes, puppies are lots of work and I get that you love your dog, I do. But no, it's not at all like being the mother of a baby.  And really, it's not okay for you to say that it is. Because completely decent human beings say "you know, we had to give Spot away. He just didn't fit with our family and our lifestyle" -try saying that about your son. Get my point? Good. 

Being a mom is lonely because you never want to talk about the days where you feel like trash. You have this beautiful, amazing child that shrunches up his nose when he giggles, and in the fabric of your soul you know that you are so ridiculously lucky to be a mom. You don't want people to think poorly of your super awesome baby. You don't want to talk about how rough it is, because when you do you feel like the kind of person that complains about how hard it is find a wallet big enough to hold all your cash. 

So you turn to internet forums filled with other clueless parents trying to figuring out what the heck they're doing--trying to find some hint as to how to deal with erratic sleep patterns, or developmental delays, etc. And inevitably someone on the forum is blasting whatever you are currently doing as sending your baby on the bullet-train to life-long failures in reading and math, relationship problems, and bad hygiene if not eminent death.

And other days your baby is so breath-taking that all you want to do is shout "oh my heck, look at him!" as he lifts himself off the floor or gives you a huge grin or figures out how to get closer to a favorite toy, but there's no one to shout to. You alone are the witness and the camera's in the other room and soon the moment's passed. 

But you're not alone. Really. I know exactly what you're talking about. Hold on. He'll fall asleep eventually. You'll get to eat something soon. Buck up, you're in the Lucky Sometimes Lonely Mom Club, and sometimes you get to the camera in time. 




Tuesday, November 6

Making Baby Food

From L-R: Apricot & Barley, Plums, Sweet Potatoes, Peas, Butternut Squash & Brown Rice, Cinnamon Apples & Oatmeal


So if I had all the money in the world I probably wouldn't make all of my own baby food. However, it really doesn't take much time and it saves so much money, it would be silly for me not to. As an added bonus, Leopleuradon's food is more or less preservative, sodium, and sugar free. I can also fix a more varied amount of food than I could buy. 

I know they sell those little baby food machines -- baby bullet, Beaba Baby, baby chef, etc. But I would be seriously surprised if they were actually worth buying. Mostly I use my immersion blender (my baby food best friend) and my microwave. Occasionally, I use my rice cooker if I'm doing a heck of a lot of grains at once. 

I also know that a lot of homemade baby food makers use little 1 oz ice cube trays, which I must admit look pretty organized and cute. But I use ziplock bags. The pros to this is that I don't have the additional step of transferring from the tray to another bag. And since I defrost a whole bag at a time in the fridge, if I overheat something, I can quick-chill it by throwing in some extra from the bag in the fridge. The cons: you have to be careful when you're dishing out from the bag to the bowl so you don't bobby trap yourself. (however, I largely avoid the messiest problems by cutting a corner of the bag and squeegeeing the last few tablespoons out that way). And, if you forget that you're running low and don't put a second bag in the fridge soon enough, it takes forever to defrost an entire bag in the microwave. 

I make baby food every week, which usually takes ten minutes but sometimes takes up to 30 depending on what I'm mixing up. And I try to make a months worth at a time of whatever I'm fixing. 

My Tips:
  • Canned plums have pits. Do yourself a favor and remove them before you blend so you don't hurt your blender blades and then also have to fish out pit shards. 
  • some sweet potatoes are super fibrous and not as good for baby food--although contrary to conventional wisdom I find that the bigger ones are actually less fibrous than the small ones. 
  • Find a bulk bin for your grains....unless you're really keen on having five lbs of barley, quinoa, bulgar wheat, and whatever else on hand
  • Even if you don't want to make all of your own baby food, do yourself a favor and mix up some brown rice and buy a quart of unsweetened applesauce-- all prepackaged baby food is essentially the same price regardless of the ingredients. So, you might as well make your own baby food blends by getting the premium vegetable and fruit purees and mixing it with your own cheap filler food (rice, apples, etc.)
  • Maybe my baby just has really perceptive taste buds, but dinobaby  greatly prefers frozen to canned vegetables. Plus frozen is generally much lower in sodium anyway. 
Oh and organics... I'd buy organic applesauce if 1--they sold it in something larger than single-serve cups here (we used to get organic applesauce by the almost half gallon out west) 2--it wasn't stupidly expensive (the half gallon was also only a couple quarters more expensive than the conventional jars). Apples just have a much larger amount of pesticide/fungicide on them than other produce. Other than that I  wouldn't sweat it. Ironically, grains (which have some of the lowest amount of pesticides in them anyway) are the only thing I do buy organic because granola-people love their bulk bins and weird cereals ;)