Nine months!

I can't believe I let his nine-month birthday slip by without posting. He'll be ten months old in 10 days!

He is a wonder. He has six teeth now (four on the top, two on the bottom) and his blonde peach fuzz is growing out, though it's coming in faster on the bottom than on the top, which makes him look a little bit like he has male pattern baldness. In the most adorable way, of course.

His new favorite word is "Dat!" I think he's saying "that." He blurts it out all day long, but he says it sort of like, "Det," so he sounds like a little South African. The other night he murmured it to himself as he was falling asleep. He really is uncontrollably cute.

And he's crawling and pulling himself up like a madman and getting into everything. I predict he will be free-standing by the time his ten-month birthday rolls around.

Oh, and he is REALLY happy, lately, squealing with joy and babbling and shrieking with laughter. What is equally adorable is the fact that the only time he is not happy is when he wakes up in the morning. He is really grouchy; it takes him a couple of minutes to stop being pissed off and start smiling. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Eight months.

Well. It has been a ridiculously long time since I posted. Being a working mom is hard. And time consuming. And I so wanted to write just a little something every day so I would have a record of his first year, like Anne Lamott's book Operating instructions. And I even have stuff I want to write, but then I forget or run out of time. I guess Facebook will have to be my official record. 

So S is EIGHT months old! I cannot believe it. He is the happiest baby on the planet. He smiles and laughs and squeals with delight. His bottom two front teeth are halfway in and the top two are starting to poke through. He is crawling like crazy and pulling up to standing and climbing on everything he can. Diaper changes are a nightmare; it's like trying to put a diaper on an eel. An eel crossed with a hyperactive monkey.

We are still cosleeping. Not sure when that is going to change. Still nursing, too, though he loves his solid foods and eats with gusto. He's my little man and we are totally in love with him. 

Six. Months!

My sweet baby boy turned six months old last weekend. He is such a joy. I love him so much I can hardly breathe sometimes. I can't even describe how ecstatic I am that I get to be his mother.

He ate his first solid food this week; puréed bananas. He made a hilarious WTF face but then got into it. And he's eating a better formula, which I pay ridiculous amounts to import from England, but it really is so much better than the other crap he was eating. Still trying to find a good Eco-conscious disposable diaper though. I tried the Honest Company diapers and learned that not only do they cost an arm and a leg, they don't work. He peed our bed three times in a week. Someone should tell Jessica Alba her diapers are as good as her acting. Zing!

But back to S. he is rolling and pre crawling up a storm. He loves bouncing up and down, either in his Jumperoo or when you hold him. He is, for the most part, really smiley and sweet and cute and colic free! We love him like crazy. He is the cat's pajamas.

Elimination communication breakdown

I'll admit it, I'm one of those people who, before I had a kid, had Very Definite Ideas about what parents should and should not do when it came to raising their babies. And then I had a baby, and I realized I was a judgmental asshole who didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. Happens to the best of us.

Take "attachment parenting." This consists of holding your baby all the time, co-sleeping, nursing on demand until the kid is pretty old, etc. I always thought this was a surefire way to raise clingy, overly dependent kids who can't wipe their own asses when they're 32. Well, guess what--when they're very small babies, you're attachment parenting whether you like it or not. "Breastfeeding on demand" means feeding them when they're hungry. And just try not picking up a crying baby. You can't do it. You're biologically programmed to be incapable of it. So yeah, I did all those things. And then we started co-sleeping, because it was the only way he would sleep. So my objection to attachment parenting pretty much went out the window. 

Then there's the "cry it out" method for sleep training. While I don't think this is for me, I know lots of people who have done it, and they say it saved their sanity. On the other hand, I know lots of people who said they can't stomach it, and I totally, 100% get that, too. 

Also, there's the thorny issue of breastfeeding. I truly believe--and numerous studies have shown--that breast milk is the best source of nutrition for babies. There's really no arguing that point. That said, modern formula is really pretty good these days. And while I think every woman ought to try as hard as she can to breastfeed, even if she can only do it for a short while, the truth is it just doesn't work out for everyone. And at the end of the day, the most important thing is that your baby is well-fed and healthy. So I say, do what you've got to do, ladies. No judgement here. 

But there is a new parenting trend that, I'm sorry, I'm judge-y as hell about. And that is something called Elimination Communication.

There was an article in the New York Times about it, then in something called DNA Info. Of course all of the parents interviewed are from Brooklyn, because we Brooklyn parents need something else to make us look like assholes. Anyway, from what I can gather, elimination communication involves not using diapers and instead "reading your baby's cues" to figure out when they're going to take a shit, then hustling to park their little butts over the closest bowl (because you're supposed to strategically place them around your house) and hope they crap or pee in it.

SERIOUSLY?

I know people in other cultures do this, but those cultures are impoverished. I guarantee if you backed a truckload of Pampers up into a rural Chinese village, they'd use the shit out of them (no pun intended).

And also. I have a full-time job. I get very little time with my precious baby. I do not want to spend all of that time scrutinizing his facial expressions and panicking over whether he's about to take a shit and racing to get him over the nearest bowl when really he's just grunting because he grunts sometimes.

And finally. I breastfeed him several times a day, bathe him, play with him, comfort him...I kind of have my hands full as it is. I really think these people have no jobs or something. I mean, we looked into cloth diapers and quickly realized we would never have the time to deal with that; how on earth could anyone have time to do this?

Sigh. Parenting is hard, people. There is no reason to make it harder than it already is. 

Despite my blog title, I'm not fucking pregnant.

So I have exactly 14 pounds to lose to get to my pre-pregnancy weight. You'd have thought that breastfeeding and forgoing wheat and dairy for so long (I'm done with that, thank God) would have whittled the weight right off me. Well, it actually kind of did--I've lost 30 pounds--but since I pigged out a little harder than I meant to during pregnancy, I gained like 45 pounds. Not quite Jessica Simpson baby #1 territory, but close. So I've got a little ways to go.

Still, I think I look mostly okay; I can get away with wearing some of my old clothes, at least the wrap dresses. But for the last several days, I've been getting offered seats on the subway. WHERE WERE YOU BASTARDS WHEN I ACTUALLY WAS PREGNANT? I mean, there were days when I was NINE MONTHS PREGNANT and it was so fucking obvious, and the dude I was standing in front of would take pains to pretend like he didn't see the giant preggo belly in his face. These last few days, the men of New York have become unbearably chivalrous all of a sudden and are falling all over themselves to offer me a seat. I know they are trying to do the right thing, but I can't help it; it makes me angry, it's so humiliating. Worst of all, yesterday some bitch actually gave me the "when are you due?" line.

Are people really that stupid? I didn't think they were, but apparently I was wrong. 

When the f*ck did I become an attachment parent?

So yeah, the reason I haven't posted in a million years is because I went back to work. I thought I had no time before, but holy shit. This is serious business. And it's haaaaaard. I work all day, I pump all day, I come home at night and drop everything and breastfeed, then I soothe him to sleep until it's time for us all to lie down. Somewhere in there, my husband cooks dinner and I scarf it down my pie hole in the few peaceful minutes that I don't have a boob in my son's mouth. Then I wake up at six the next morning, feed my son, get myself ready without any help because my husband leaves for work at 5:00 a.m., scarf down cereal while my son plays, and try to be ready to walk out the door by 8:00.

Work is going good, though. And we finally resolved our childcare sitch, albeit expensively. I sucked it up and got a nanny. We were going to do a share, but we broke it off when the female-to-male transexual father of the child my son was going to share with ended up being too closed-minded about the nanny I wanted to hire (you read all that right. It's a hilarious topic for another posting. Also, my life is a sitcom, as a friend pointed out).

Anyway, I was all scared of hiring a nanny because of the idea of leaving my baby alone with a stranger all day, and one terrible thing that happened in NYC last year that I can't even bring myself to mention fully. But as it happened, some good friends of ours announced they have to leave the city for a work opportunity, and lo and behold, they needed a new home for their beloved nanny. So we met her, loved her and crunched some numbers. And because my husband gets home at 4:00 PM and I don't leave for work until 8:00, we found we could make it work financially, albeit just barely.

She's great, though. And it's such a load off my mind not to have to load him up every morning and take him on the subway, then drop him off, then get back on the subway and go back to work (which had been my only option before, because there aren't really any daycares in my neighborhood who take infants and have open spots).

Meanwhile, I am a gross attachment parent now, apparently. My son sleeps in the bed with us all night now. It was going to be a temporary move to get us through the 19 week sleep regression, but we never stopped. Truth: I kind of love it. I think it's partly because I miss him so much during the day that I love snuggling with him all night. And the nursing is still going strong, though I'm supplementing now. I expect I will keep doing it for at least the next 7 months. It's such a sure-fire way to calm him down that I'm not sure I want to take it out of my arsenal just yet. So yeah, I'm hoping I'm not still doing it when he's 2. Of course I can say now, "I would never do that!" But that's exactly what I said about him sleeping in the bed with us. Sigh.

Also, I bought a recipe book to make his baby food, and I ordered him these special non-toxic diapers, because I care about whether he has chemicals up in his butt. As I said to a friend, "What happened to me? I used to be sort of cool."

Google "four month sleep regression" if you want to understand what fresh hell I am living through right now.

S., a formerly champion sleeper, is now waking up a gajillion times a night to eat. He slept soooooooo gooooooood when we went to Texas (oh, and he did fucking awesome on the flights--thank you, breastfeeding, even though you are a pain in the ass). He slept eight hours a night for like three nights in a row.

And now? He will. not. sleep. Unless we co-sleep.

I know, I know, I knowiknowiknow. It's dangerous, I'm setting a bad precedent, blah blah blah. But I feel like it's more dangerous to breastfeed sitting up, then put him back in his sleeper, because a) I fall asleep while feeding him, and I'm afraid he could roll out of my arms and onto the floor; and b) because he wakes up and cries the instant I set him down in the sleeper and we need to fucking sleep some time.  Also, when we do co-sleep and my boob happens to fall out of his mouth, he wakes up and cries.

So that's what we've been doing the last several nights. I feel awful about it. (But I admit I also really enjoy the snuggling. Especially since I've gone back to work this week. Yeah, I buried the lead. More on that later.)