Winter is Better

For blogging, anyway.

I always swore I wouldn't make excuses if I didn't post on this blog very often. I mean, it's a blog with a readership of 10 people. Most of you know why I've been too busy to blog. And if you don't know, this blog's for you.

An X-Ray of My Heart

The evening of her second birthday, Violet started limping. Actually, limping isn't quite the right word, because it was more of a shuffle walk than a limp. Hard to describe, really. My sister in law thought she had a load in her diaper because of her walk, but that wasn't quite it.

The limp seemed to come and go. My Mom didn't notice it at all when she babysat during the day on Thursday but it was fairly pronounced when I got home from work that night. We wracked our brains to think of a fall or injury that she may have sustained that could have caused the change in her gait, but could come up with none. Violet didn't seem bothered by it and was moving as much as ever if not as smoothly. She had a long standing appointment with her doctor the next day for her two year check up and I figured I could ask about it then.

When the doctor had her take a runway stroll, she immediately noticed the odd shuffle walk. Doc wanted to be safe instead of sorry, and since she determined that Violet wasn't a complainer, (she hadn't so much as whimpered during her entire exam), she ordered some x-rays to rule out a fracture.

And I was glad the Doc ordered the x-rays. I was worried. It's amazing how quickly my mind went to unfathomable places without even so much as Googling "Toddler Limp." I thought of how blindsided parents must feel when their little person is diagnosed with some horrible, dangerous, maybe life-ending disease. I found myself holding my girl's hand a little tighter when I walked her through the parking lot and not jumping up hurriedly after she fell asleep when I laid down with her for her nap but instead laying next to her and sucking in the smell of her damp head.

So after 2 days of gnawing, churning worry, I was hoping to lay this thing to rest and move on. We headed from the pediatrician's office to the imaging center a couple of miles away. It was 3pm and Violet was exhausted. We'd been at our mothering group meeting early in the morning, had lunch with a friend, had a doctor's appointment, and not even gotten close to a nap. Violet was a plum in the waiting room despite her fatigue and she managed to woo everyone in the place. When her name was finally called, we headed back to a private waiting room with the technician. She had me undress Violet completely (the snaps on her diaper would have interfered with the x-ray) and we waited together alone in the quiet room while she set up the machine down the hall.

During our private wait, I nursed the tired love and she fell asleep in a matter of seconds. I was hopeful that she would sleep through the whole ordeal and never be any the wiser. The radiologist came back and let me know she was ready for us and I took Violet down the hall to the imaging room. I laid her down gently but before her little butt even skimmed the table she whipped back awake and terror ensued.

Two twenty-something men came in to restrain my little crumb-cake. Since her limp was so hard to define, they had to take about a million different shots so that the doctors could make sure things looked copacetic from every angle.

It was, hands down, the worst 10 minutes of my short parenting career. It between hysterical, breath-stealing sobs, Violet managed to get out the few words she thought would get her point across most clearly. "Mommy!" and "No!' were her most frequent cries but she also repeated, "I go back home," like a mantra. At one point, the radiologist told me I could lay on the x-ray table with Violet between my legs for a couple x-rays and she just clung to me, sobbing, "Peese, Mommy, peese!"

By the time we were finished, I really didn't care what was wrong with Violet's leg anymore I just wanted to get my baby the hell away from her tormentors, who, incidentally, were all wonderfully nice people. They just happened to need to lay my naked baby down under a lead vest and hold her immobile in a dozen different poses to do their job. The x-rays showed nothing and Violet's limp mostly cleared up by the end of the weekend so, mercifully, we don't have to take any further medical action. The cause of the limp will remain a mystery but it was likely a virus or a fall that caused it.

The only follow-up required on this one is thanking Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, Brahma, Mohammad, and every other deity and life force around for the health of my firstborn baby. I didn't know I was capable of generating worry like what I felt when I let my mind imagine the worst. It is no wonder parents have gray hairs and wrinkled faces. We are charged with protecting the most important and fragile things in existence; our kids.

Two Years of Violet

Tomorrow we celebrate two years of Violet.

They have certainly been two years sweeter than any others I've known.

Because of Mom, I am Mommy

I am the kind of Mom who recognizes the importance of family dinners. I'll put plates in the oven if you can't make it, but if it's possible, we'll all just wait. The Mom who includes kids in the conversation never mind their age or interest level.

I'm the Mom who tries not to get touched-out, who realizes this is my decade to stroke baby thighs and lay in bed feeling rhythmic, humid, toddler breath on my neck and chest. I'm the mom who can't think of anything better than a king-sized bed with three loved ones side-by-side sleeping late into the morning.

I will be the Mom who will side with her kids at the risk of belligerence on the sides soccer fields and in the bleachers at basketball courts. I'll be the Mom who lets her kids decide what activity and how much cause I don't care if it's dance or football or reading if that's where their heart is I will be thrilled.

Vacations are crucial for weaving the memory quilt of our family and I am the Mom who knows it. I also know that a driving get-away to Toledo can produce as many warm-fuzzies as a trip to the beach can and it is all in how you approach it. I'm the Mom who'll hang banners over the breakfast table if a birthday falls on a school day. And, holidays? Forget it--I am the Mom who will coax the magic out of every last one of them!

I am the Mom who will always answer the phone and have time to talk. I am the Mom who will put things in perspective and always, ALWAYS, leave my grown-up baby feeling a little less afraid after we hang-up. I am the Mom who will still let my grown child sleep in my bed, because sometimes that is the only way to feel safe.

I am the Mom who knows how to laugh and is never embarrassed that my laugh is the loudest in the room. My kids are encouraged by my rolling Mom-laugh and will ham it up just for me. I am the rare Mom that is a friend and a parent without sacrificing any duty of one role for the sake of the other.

I am the Mom who has a life. I realize my kids will also have a life apart from our family and I know that their Mom needs to do the same.

I am the Mom who loves her husband and the father of her kids. I know that everything he does is done with his family in mind and I couldn't have married a better father. I am the Mom who can see her husband through her child's eyes and never forget how important that relationship is.

This is my Mom, and I hope, someday, it will be me.







Love you, Mommy. Happy Mother's Day!

Tough Decisions

What is more appealing, an afternoon nap or a chocolate chip cookie?


Violet wrestled with this very question last weekend.

What's Up, Doc?

I got the chance to lead a meeting of my local breastfeeding support group today and it was awesome. We always have a topic and I chose "Breastfeeding Advocacy." The group was super and the conversation flowed really well with moms from all different backgrounds sharing their personal experience with nursing as well as their views. There were 10 or so moms at the group and we were all coming from differing places. A couple of the moms are brand new with babies 3 months old or less (including Ava and Amanda), a few are nursing older infants, and some of us are nursing our toddlers.

Our conversation ranged from birth, to nutrition, to sleep, to weaning, and touched lots of topics in between. What always shocks me is how much bad-- no, APPALLING-- advice is being given to new mothers regarding breastfeeding. Some bits of advice is more excusable than others, like the well-meaning grandmother telling a new mother that she had fed her own babies rice cereal in a bottle at two months to help them sleep. Now, this advice flies in the face of the American Academy of Pediatrics advice on starting solids, but I can give Grandma the benefit of the doubt because she raised her children many years ago and there is no reason why she would have kept up on the latest medical recommendations for infant nutrition.

The APPALLING part comes in when I hear mother after mother talking about the horrific advice she was given by the DOCTOR. I am beginning to think that pediatricians as a group are the saddest lot of professionals out there. Here is an example of some of the advice given to a handful of mothers at our group today: "Do not feed your baby any more frequently than every three hours."


"Your baby is growing fast and you will have to start him on cereal at 4 months to keep up with his growth."

"Your baby has breastmilk jaundice. Give him formula."

Each one of these golden nuggets of advice fly in the face of sound breastfeeding management and have the potential to destroy a mother's breastfeeding relationship with her baby. My own personal EX-doctor advised me at her one month check up to begin giving Violet formula because I was going back to work and needed to "get her used to the taste of it." Thanks Dr. Fortner--great advice, but no thanks to you we were able to exclusively breastfeed for 6 months despite my work schedule. That probably wouldn't have happened if I'd listened to the doctor. She never did have to "get used to" the taste of formula.

I left that meeting more convinced than ever that there IS a need for breastfeeding advocacy in my community. Help with breastfeeding certainly isn't coming from the top down, so I guess it needs to move from the bottom up. I think the part of the situation that makes me the angriest is that moms are bombarded with the message that nursing is the best (like the recent Pediatrics study that was featured in the New York Times and a hundred other media outlets highlighting the $13 billion dollar price tag in the US from our failure to breastfeed) and then we not prepared in any way, shape, or form to actually do it. I have dear friends who wanted to nurse and couldn't, not because of any failure on their part, but because they were not supported by the medical community to get through the difficult first weeks of motherhood and nursing. My sister-in-law, Aly, was a pro-breastfeeder with her second son Charlie, but still laments her less-than-ideal start with her first boy Jack.

And Aly is right when she says, "Guilt Be Gone." I would suggest, however, that the feeling of guilt be replaced with a feeling of anger and a desire for change. Anger at the way our country's medical establishment sabotages breastfeeding and a desire to make ours the LAST generation of American women who "can't breastfeed" their babies. If you want to, you should be able to, plain and simple. But you cannot do it alone. My hope is that when Violet becomes a mom, she won't even understand why women of my generation had such trouble with nursing.

Finally, I want to share one more link from The Huffington Post that I think any mother who wasn't able to meet her personal breastfeeding goals should read. It was written by Dr. Melissa Bartick and is titled Peaceful Revolution: Motherhood and the $13 Billion Guilt. She says it so well, I only hope women out there are listening! We deserve more!

Housekeeping in the Time of a Toddler

I am tired of sweeping the floor. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, I love our floor, I am grateful to have it and the roof that goes over it, but Christ on a crutch, the floor is CONSTANTLY dirty.

When we chose new flooring for our house, the rednecky guy at the flooring store warned me that the dark hardwood I wanted was not the best at disguising dirt. But my heart was set. And, I know flooring was the rednecky guy's business, but he didn't look like he'd spent a whole lot of time cleaning floors in his life. "Women's work," you know; so I doubted him. A really, really, dark floor, I surmised, would be like a dark colored shirt, hiding much more than a white one. Turns out, there is a lot more light colored floor dirt in the world than I'd expected.

It might help if I didn't share the house with a pack of wolves toddler. Violet doesn't try to be messy. Actually, sometimes Violet does try to be messy. But generally, she's just learning. Learning and leaving a trail of learning dust wherever she goes. Most of the floor schmaltz is unrecognizable in its current form; it has just become whitish dust collecting at the doorsteps of all of our kitchen appliances. Sometimes I'll spot a shred of cheese or a square of Life cereal that has been stepped on ever so gingerly allowing it to retain its woven pattern but disintegrate as soon as my fingers reach to scoop it up.

And Shawn, God love him, wears his mud caked work boots in the house every other day tracking bits of grass and mud in just about every room in the house. I think he figures it is the duration of his trip into the house that dictates the necessity of removing his shoes. So if he is only going to be in the house for 3 minutes, he'll leave them on. Never mind that during those three minutes he'll stomp garden dirt from the front door, up the stairs, into the bathroom, back downstairs, through the living room for a check of the score, into the kitchen and past the fridge for a glass of lemonade, and then back out the back door. It looks like that little kid from the Family Circus has been running laps through the house by the time Shawn heads back outside.

Scout tracks in all sorts of crap, too. Even the cat manages to leave footprints on the floor. She doesn't ever leave the house, but she has litter dust to add to the mix. Gross.

Luckily, I don't ever do anything dirty to our floors. At least one of us isn't a slob.

Sweeping used to be a once-a-week activity in my life. I am at the point now where I am doing it every other day. And everyday probably wouldn't hurt it. I have no idea what is normal for other people but this seems like excessive cleaning to me. I don't know about you, but I can think of four hundred and thirty-six thousand other activities I would rather do than clean my house EVERYDAY. But the spring sunshine bouncing off of the dust bunnies just doesn't make me feel like mother of the year. So I get out the broom. Or the Swiffer. Or the mostly worthless little vacuum that is supposed to easily tackle small jobs like my kitchen floor but is more like a dust bunny Cuisinart the way it spins the fluff away from the suction instead of into it.

I'm trying to keep up but I am really seeing the value of a live-in maid more and more. Or maybe just poorer vision so the dirt wouldn't bother me. Or lower standards. Or maybe we just need to go shoeless indoors, Tokyo-style. And get rid of the pets. And feed Violet exclusively outdoors.

But my guess is that I should just keep the broom handy.