Fabulous Miss S.

Mission aborted

For once, we finished dinner and cleaned up before Noah's bedtime.  I usually don't even bother to eat dinner until he is fast asleep, but then I eat at 9:00pm ...

Marc had some work to do so he headed off to the basement and I headed upstairs to bathe Noah and get him to sleep.  He had a bath. I put on PJs.  He nursed. He fell asleep fast. No problems.

I was basking in the glory that only a new mom can have when she is faced with an hour to herself and only a short list of chores, totally ignorable for the moment.  I made myself a nice hot bath with salts and a bubbles.  I lit candles, got a beer and two recent issues of Redbook.

I slid into the bath and cracked open my magazine.  I read seven pages before a screaming baby lit up the baby monitor that was standing next to my relaxing glowing candles.   So I toweled off and lumbered down the hallway to rock, cuddle and nurse Noah back to sleep. 

Fifteen minutes later I was back in my lukewarm bath adding some hot water and taking a long swig of my Peroni beer. 

Five more pages.

Waaaa.... Errrr, WaaaaAAAAAA, UH-WAAAAA ... UH-WAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

Once again I toweled off and traipsed down the hallway to Noah's room.  This time he spit-up all over me and himself.  So I cleaned him up and calmed him down and he went back to sleep. 

I drained the bathtub, giving up on any relaxation time for the night, put on my clothes and went to clean up the kitchen.

Fab Does Food: Introduction

I've been reading the blogs of several other women and I've found a theme throughout: there are a lot of busy moms, wives, (and dads!) out there who want to be able to cook healthy and delicious meals for their families that are both cost and time efficient. 

I learned to cook at a relatively early age with the help of my mother and a grandmother.  I baked cookies with my mom as a little girl but when my mom went back to work when I was ten years old, I found myself needing and wanting to make a dinner for myself, my brother and my dad.  So, I just sort of figured it out.

I am going to publish at least once a week on this thread.  I will post and discuss recipes and ways to alter those recipes based on taste and personal preferences.  I think anyone can learn to cook.  And, cook with confidence by knowing a few basic tenants of food and seasonings.  Even if you best meal is Stouffers Lasagna I can teach you to be more confident in the kitchen.

I'm a pretty good cook, if I do say so myself and my goal is to help other women who aren't so confidant in the kitchen.  I want to emphasize that while I'm a good cook, I am not a gourmet cook:  I don't like blue cheese or goat cheese. I do not eat oysters. I prefer my fish grilled and my meat thoroughly cooked.  I DO prefer a lot of vegetables and lean proteins, fruits and whole grains and occasional high carb pasta meals.  I am a real person who likes food and has struggled with those pesky 15 pounds for twenty years now. 

I am embarking on this new little endeavor here because I had a baby four months ago and I am working to get into at least SOME of my summer clothes, and, I like to cook and this seems like a good tangent to get myself writing more often.

Holes

I find myself vacillating between pure blissful contentedness and severe self-loathing and it is getting exhausting.  I couldn't tell you why per-say but it's getting to be a real drag on my psyche, self-esteem and overall energy level.  I dwell on my faults way too much and have a harder time than I can describe valuing my truly positive traits; good mother, nice neighbor/friend, half-decent cook ??.  Blah blah blah   

I'm ashamed to admit there are actual moments when I it is all I can do to summon a smile to my face so that Noah doesn't see my sadness or momentary desperation with myself.  I don't think a four-month-old can really sense my despair and disgust at my own body, the body that gave him life and continues to be his sole source of food, energy and comfort, but goddammit, why do I have to feel so shitty about myself?  I refuse to pretend to feel happy when I just don't feel it. I am unhappy with the way I look, the way I feel and the continued fact that nothing in my entire closet fucking fits me AT ALL. 

I actually have a fear of being a fat person who doesn't see themselves as overweight and unattractive, you know, the kind of person who is secretly and not so secretly made fun of in public.  I realize that that sentence might be the most politically incorrect statement I have written on this site but right now I am just so dammed unsure of myself and my new roles that it is shaking my core.  I still feel guilty for not bringing home a paycheck and I because I don't, I don't know how much attention and time I should demand from my husband who does contribute in a monetary fashion.  The rules have changed and I feel like I am staring at a poster of rules from a distance so far away that they are blurry like the last tiny line of the eye chart. 

Today I am roiling in my my lacking ability to ever get anything written, to ever attract more than twenty readers in a day, to summon the energy it takes to strap the baby into the baby bjorn and take the dog for a walk around the block.  My computer is insanely slow and old which is just pissing me off at the moment when my brain is talking faster than the words actually appear on the screen because of some damn lack-of-memory-key-delay thing I have to deal with.  There are dishes in the sink piling up because I'm too lazy to unload the dishwasher and errands to be done that I can't fathom leaving the house to accomplish. 

I do realize that there is an outside possibility that the parasitic and often symbiotic relationship between my self esteem and my body weight is THE unhealthy factor of this equation.   I'm starting to feel a little desperate because I know the effects a parent's sadness have on a child.  And I really just want to get past this.

 

My mornings start with a long nursing and cuddling session that often are so touching and so heartwarming that I am carried through the day in a cloud of baby-neck softness. 

Noah is doing so well that it tickles me. We are doing well, overall.  It's just this thing that sneaks up and nags me.   

Urgh.

Some bloggers complain that they can't seem to step away from their blogs but recently I've been feeling like I can't get a second to myself for my blog, and even if I do have a few seconds, I don't know what to say.  I think I actually have too much to say. 

It's been busy.  Passover. In-laws visiting. Friends from Vermont visiting. Noah's bedtime and ability to sleep through the night shot to bloody hell.  Dog sent away. Dog is now back home.  Me? Tired. Minor allergies. Urgh ... exhausted.

Baby in sunglasses makes it all better.

Progress

Noah has taken a turn toward actual child-like older-baby development and it dually saddens and tickles me to death.  When we make gurggling sounds at him he makes some very different sounds right back at us with sincere gusto.  Sometimes he even manages to spit at us.

I used to sit on the sofa a lot, holding him and watching television.  This works with a baby who is less than three months old apparently because he isn't having anymore of that passive parenting crap. He prefers his playmat where the bell, purple dinosaur-giraffe and the yellow lion-like cat hang precariously over him and entertain him better than I can, apparently. 

He has been sleeping well. I am not going to elaborate too much because I fear other mothers will hunt me down and make me smell dirty diapers until I pass out.  Gist: Noah is sleeping well enough for me to get my own sleep, in my own bed. I still do get up in the night to feed him but golly gee, he goes back to sleep right away!  We had to get up early this morning and we actually had to go into his room and get him out of his crib at 7 o'clock.  But don't celebrate yet, I was awake at 5am feeding him that morning too.

Meanwhile, napping is not our strong suit.  He napped this weekend for about two hours but only because I slept next to with my boob in his mouth for most of that time.  Also, please observe the full-on thumb sucking.

What you cannot see in this picture is that he is losing his hair.  He has an increasingly large bald spot area ring around his entire head.  Remember those horrific bowl-cut hair styles of the late 80s-early 90s?  It's sort of like someone put a bowl on his head and he's losing hair all along the edge of the bowl.  The fantasticness of this style he is sporting is exemplified best by the party in the back thing he has going where he has a good inch and a half of thick dark hair at the very base of his head just above his neck that is growing wildly.   He's lucky that we already love him unconditionally.  Or maybe he'll single handedly bring back the mullet.