I don’t have much to add right now – 2010 did, in fact, kick my ass but left me even a smidge more than 20% more in love with everyone and everything around me. In about 2 hours and a few minutes, I’ll celebrate the anniversary of becoming a mother for the first time, 9 years ago. 9!

In the meantime, I figured I’d share some videos, because that’s about all I have time for. Four college classes, a fun-time wordpress class via Tara Gentile, and the rest of my IBCLE L-CERP hours through Health e-Learning is keeping me a busy girl on top of assistant daisy scout leader and all those kids I gots. Plus, all the cooking! Who has time for all these dishes??! I have some exciting stuff in the works as well, but we’ll talk about that later!

So, here. Enjoy:

Amanda Palmer talks about Tasmania.

Harry Potter. Feeling fly like it’s Quidditch.

And some totally not awkward Les Paul & Mary Ford sandwiched between Listerine ads.

And…back to homework!

Photo by Petite Chose

Anyway, this isn’t really a real post. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just trying, first, to figure out all this switching from wordpress with the dot com to wordpress with the dot org and how I can have them both synched like syncing Swatch watches and I can have the dot com fowarding to the dot org and WHY OH WHY can’t I figure out how to change those default templates for widgets on the sidebar on the over there? (Side note: if you are familiar with DIY Thesis for WordPress and you want to hold my hand and walk me through it, I’ll happily bake you some scones in my toaster oven. (not a euphemism.)) Anyway, my “real” site is http://www.milkstained.com but I just realized that all links on the page link to my “about” page. Whatever. I’m sure that you have me in your blog reader or your blog feeder or whatever it is the kids are using these days to be reading the blogs, so update your shit!

(Aside: I just did an image search for 1980s Swatch watches and I am a bit shocked and pleasantly surprised at the rush of warm feelings I got from looking at all those so loved timepieces! So much so that for a brief instant I thought I could smell them! Check this out – did you know me way back when and you’re reading this now? Test my memory: EMILY, ALSO EMILY, JENN???. Why can’t I remember what my own looked like??)

So here’s what brought me here, other than the fact that it saddens me to see that I get two visits a day and they always seem to be from folks searching for “bring milk out of your boobs,” “can’t control my kids,” and “wiping too hard sore.” I think that one is my most recent favorite. For some reason, “injuries” ranks second. Anyway, my list-of-terms-used-to-search-my-blog sometimes rivals that of ol’ Jessica Gottlieb but I will spare you the horror. What brings me here, I keep trying to say, is that Erica Jong wrote an article on motherhood where she proposes that attachment parenting encourages parents to cater to their children. Anyway, I just wanted to share my comment on it, since I’m pretty sure most of my pals out there aren’t trolling around on the WSJ. Lord knows I’m not!

Photo by Petite Chose

Here’s what I said over there, I said:

Here’s the thing about Attachment Parenting as it’s defined by Dr. and Mrs. Sears & Attachment Parenting International - it’s not about helicopter parenting or becoming a martyr for mommyhood, as Jong seems to suggest. It’s also not about white celebrity women whisking away babies from other countries and leaving them with nannies to make it seem like parenting is real easy. It’s about understanding meeting your babies’ needs. Punto Final.

Check out the Eight Principals of Attachment parenting here at API’s website:

I think that some of the most important principles of Attachment Parenting are outlined on Sears’ site, which packages them as the “7 Baby Bs.” Key points that I find resonate are that attachment parenting is not a strict set of rules – it is an approach, and that it is a tool for responsive parenting.

This approach obviously needs to be adapted to each family. A working mother is not going to be able to wear her young infant as much if s/he’s in daycare during working hours – but that doesn’t mean that mom can’t be in close proximity to baby when they ARE together, or that the baby can’t have the same kind of loving touch from another caregiver. Maybe mom is one of the 1-2% of women who physically are unable to breastfeed – but as she feeds her baby another woman’s donated milk or infant formula from a bottle, instead of propping the bottle on a stuffed animal so she can paint her nails & watch her stories, she could mimic the way a breastfeeding mom might hold her nursing baby so that they can maximize skin contact, make eye contact, and that she can stroke and touch her baby as s/he feeds. Maybe mom (and dad, or 2nd mom) don’t sleep well with baby in bed with them, or maybe baby can’t sleep like that. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t use a co-sleeper that attaches to the bed, or that they can’t bring the crib into their room & room-in so that they can be responsive in their nighttime parenting.

I say to you that all of these tools, all of these things in the attachment parenting mindset – they’ve made my life infinitely easier as a parent because I understand my childrens’ needs and I am not constantly engaged in a struggle with them – “no, it’s bedtime! go to sleep!” It has helped what can be a difficult transition – becoming a parent – a little smoother. It has brought harmony to our family.

It has NOT made my excessively permissive, overly cautious, or my spoiled brats’ BFF.

The thing that attachment parenting has done for me as a *feminist* is that it has made me acutely aware of how the feminist movement – and American society at large – are willing to throw mothers and children under the bus. I consider myself pro-choice; however now that I am a mother, I find that there is a lack of support from pro-choice organizations when it comes to maternal health (the US rate of infant and maternal mortality is abysmal) and breastfeeding support (yes, it’s a choice, but many women choose not to do it because they lack the proper support) and perhaps most importantly when it comes to further family planning. It is not attachment parenting that fails me as a woman and a feminist. It is feminism, devastatingly, that fails me as an attached mother in a detached world.

I’ll leave you with some fun, happy music that you would totally dance and clap to with your kids if only – IF ONLY – you would bow and cater to their every whim. Many thanks to april for introducing me to Hey Marseilles.

That’s how we’re going to celebrate World Breastfeeding Week on up over here. I know it ended last week – there were fireworks and celebratory conferences, but I was too busy panicking about the end of the kids’ camp, my own classes that I’m not yet registered for starting soon, and…well, breastfeeding. I had a fleeting idea that Queen Baby was ready to wean in honor of the week – she’d started out on Monday screaming things like, ‘I don’t want your milk! Your milk is stupid!’ but by Thursday or so she was back to the usual antics of flopping my breast onto her head and calling it her milk helmet and then peeing her bed in the middle of the night and coming to me to snuggle up & nurse til dawn.

And so it goes.

But an even bigger reason that I was so neglectful in posting was that I really wanted to talk about nursing the twins, and I wanted to talk about what it was like to try to breastfeed in the NICU. When I went back in my Livejournal all the way back to 2004, I just found myself completely re-traumatized. I guess because in the day-to-day reality of having 3 kids in two years I had managed to just emotionally push my way through the pregnancy and birth and NICU stay and beyond, I never really went back and unpacked all the baggage. I *thought* I did when the girls were two or so. I was wrong!

two!

I started breastfeeding twins in or around February of 2004. I’d been a percussion major in college, and it just seemed to follow that the next step in my career would be to expose my breasts every two hours or so and let two tiny, tiny little babies latch on so that they could feed. So I went and got pregnant, timing things perfectly so that my son would be about 2 when they were born – because if you’re going to have three kids, why not make it a fucking challenge, you know? Only things spun a little bit out of control when we found out that they had Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome, and then it got even stickier when Baby B decided to stop growing right around 32w or so and we agreed to an induction at 34 weeks.

It’s hard to keep a birth story short, especially when it’s a good one that involves my inlaws showing up shortly after a pitocin drip & artificial rupture of membranes but BEFORE an epidural has been begged for and placed. But suffice it to say that nobody expected any babies to be born – especially not vaginally, I suspect – before 3 or 4 in the morning, so it was a big surprise at 9 in the evening when I started complaining that I was feeling pushy. So both babies were born in a room with 50 or so folks attending and they were whisked away to the NICU so they could breathe and stuff while I was left with my numb lower body and my vajine hanging out all over the OR. Soon, though, they realized that the girls were healthy little nubbins and the nurses came and harassed me as I shivered and shook in the recovery room, tsk-tsking me to “hurry up” and recover from my epidural so I could get down there to nurse them.

But of course, by the time we got to the NICU, they’d already been fed. And that’s pretty much what happened for the next three weeks. They sent Jessica Wakefield home after about 3 days – she weighed in at almost 5 pounds and she’d been beating the crap out of all the other babies in there, and they said she was a bully and a jerk and they just didn’t want her anymore. We were in the middle of doing demolition on the kitchen, but we went and got her anyways. They held onto Lizzie for almost a full 3 weeks, which were the longest of my life. In looking back, I don’t think I ever expected her to come home.

At the time, I had only heard of Kangaroo Mother Care, and the girls got very little in the way of skin to skin time with me. I had no idea just how important it is.

If you’ll bear with me, I’ll share some journal excerpts from those early, early days of nursing them:

Feb. 27 – “Jessica is a champ. She’s very sleepy. They said to expect her awake for 2 hours a day, and not all at once. She’s very alert when she is awake, though. She nurses ok; she eats a ton & wakes herself for feedings, which they hadn’t expected her to do, but she is still a sleepy nurser & her suck is kinda weak, so we just keep working at it. It’s really hard. I want her to get as much food in her as I can, though, so I don’t know where to draw the line btw bottle and breast – plus, I want her to keep nursing from the breast so I can give everything I pump to Lizzie.”

Baby in a Box

“I went to the NICU last night and it was devastating. I didn’t realize that the warmer isolette was soundproof. Lizzie’s nurse was with her other baby, feeding it, and Lizzie was screaming. She was purple and just screaming, and as soon as I opened the thingy you could hear her. It was so, so, so, so, so heartbreaking. I just busted into tears and cried the whole time I was there. It sucked. It really, really, really sucked. She nursed wonderfully while I was there, and I was able to drop off like 8oz. of milk for her. But she quieted down as soon as I picked her up and it just hurt so badly to know that I had to leave her. At the very least, I want to know when they expect her to be in a little salad bin so that she doesn’t have to cry like that anymore. God, did that suck.”

After a few days, I gave up on trying to nurse her in the NICU. I wasn’t able to visit but once a day because I now had two children at home and it was the height of RSV season. I pumped what I could for her and brought it in, but I honestly didn’t feel like the NICU staff was very supportive. I labeled my milk containers and put them in the fridge, but I don’t know that they got used. She was on a high-calorie formula that was intended to pack on the pounds. Plus, as my sister-in-law noted on my Facebook page nursing in the NICU is a little bit like this:

Nursing in the NICU

March 8 “She might get the tube taken out of her nose tomorrow. My girl! she is up to 3lbs. 11oz., and w/o a tube, she’d be able to come home kinda soon! I’m hoping that tomorrow we can get some skin to skin time and that I’ll be there for a feeding.”

“The babies are well. My milk is increasing. Jessica nurses like crazy, which is good/bad/scary, and Lizzie does well when she’s awake and I put her up to it. Jessica is getting all big and juicy and cute and Lizzie is still, as they were calling her yesterday, the Monkey Baby. she is balding and ruddy and looks pissed off all the time. She’s ugly. I love it. Everybody’s all “oh, they don’t look identical at all!” and I know what they’re really saying. I love my ugly baby!“

Eventually, they sent Lizzie home. The first time I put them next to each other, they immediately started snuffling and rooting at each other. It took at least another three weeks at home for little Lizzie and I to get the groove of our nursing relationship going. I didn’t have the same support of my pediatrician as I’d had with my son, and I had the additional booby traps of several cases of free, high-calorie formula with promises of more to come. I hadn’t joined any local breastfeeding support groups and I was too shy, scared, and embarrassed to find a lactation consultant. It’s a little mind-boggling how we got through it. I wanted to give up many, many times, but ol’ Brian Ropez crawled up my ass and stayed there until we got it going. “Look how clear Jessica Wakefield’s skin is compared to Lizzie’s,” he would say. “She had a tiny umbilical cord, a reduced placental share, AND she gave her share of the meals to her sister. Why can’t we give her every advantage *outside* the womb?” And of course, I hated him for it because I was the one with the sore tits and the crying baby, and he was the one free to eat popcorn and watch TV at any given hour of the night while we practiced our latch. But we did it. My goal of “a few weeks” became “six months.”

Six months came and went, and I participated in a project called, “When Mothers Nurse,” which later featured a photo of us nursing in the Spanish version of a breastfeeding manual.

Yep, that's nip!

And then one year became two, and two became three. We didn’t wean until shortly after we moved to this house and I discovered I was pregnant with Queen Baby. We are just about to tip into the time where they will have been weaned for longer than they nursed.

Oh, dear, my time is up. Ol’ Queen Super Baby had one of those 6PM bedtimes and so right about now it was a 5 hour nap. Hey, hey, let’s play!

Quickly, here’s some links to help for breastfeeding preemies and twins:

Kelly Mom’s site

Babycenter’s preemie page

La Leche League

Ask Dr. Sears

An here’s my graceful exit – time for bed!

Fuzzy kitty wants some mookies

I’m doing a bang-up job of posting every day, aren’t I? Jessica Wakefield likes to accuse me of “forgetting about EVERYTHING!” with a little stomp of her foot sometimes. And I have to say, “no, honey, I’m not forgetting that I told said you couldn’t play with your friends when everybody else was. I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and trust that you’re going to change your behavior so I don’t have to go through the rigmarole of trying to keep you in the house for the next few hours.” Maybe that’s lazy, laissez-faire parenting, but I never claimed to want to take the hard route in any of this.

Not wanting to take the hard route is kind of what led to my experience with co-sleeping, tandem breastfeeding, and extended breastfeeding. There have been times when I’ve wondered oh my goodness, am I fucking all of this up because I’m taking the easy way out, not being a hard ass about weaning when I’m not really *into* nursing a two-year old anymore??! But what I’ve come to realize is that it’s not laziness – it’s doing things naturally, and following the flow of what works for my family. My son showed us early on that he wasn’t interested in sleeping anywhere but on me or next to me. At that point we had the choice of “training” him to sleep on his own and be more independent at a point in his life when he’d been inside my body for longer than he had been in the world with us, and it simply did not feel right and instead of requiring that he adapt to fit my needs, we adapted to fit his.

Sometimes I like to think of raising small kids as tending a garden. Don’t hold me to this literally, mind you, because I can’t keep a house plant alive for shit and my vegetable garden has been the victim of homicide. I blame the squirrels! But they need so much tender care when they are tiny little shoots – the right soil, just the right amount of water and son, a little bit of Mozart in the background. An early frost will kill a tender young plant. It’s not until later when they’ve grown a little & have hearty stalks that you can walk away and sit in the shade and read a book and trust them to grow a little more on their own.

we wasted so much money on pacifiers.

We nightweaned at around 13 or 14 months or so, shortly after we moved into our first little house. It took both Brian Ropez and I lying down with him on either side, pretty much pretending we were dead but a very deep-breathing-dead to convince him to just lay down and close his eyes. He would toss and turn, spin around three times like a puppy. The rule was you could do what you needed to do as long as you stayed on the bed. My point is that it took work on our part as parents, but we helped him figure out how to ease himself into sleep without it being overly stressful for any of us. Shortly after that, we had him pick out his own toddler bed at the Big Swedish playground and help build it, and we started napping there shortly after. From there, getting to have bedtime in his own bed, in his own room, was much easier.

The time I had to take the really difficult route and draw a hard-line in the sand was in weaning my son. It’s my biggest parenting regret; I honestly never expected the girls to come so early and had hoped to gradually ease him off before they were born. Instead, they were born at 34 weeks and he was still going strong with the sucky sucky. At first, I let him. He was excited to have such a strong inflow of new milk!! but the laxative properties of the newborn-intended product took us all by surprise. Jessica Wakefield came home from the NICU quickly – she was but a few days old – and so I tried tandem nursing, hoping that he would help keep my supply up.

Instead, I found that suddenly, nursing him made me really angry. It took me by surprise, this visceral, deep feeling of repulsion. Our biggest fault as humans, I think, is forgetting constantly that we are – despite our brains – creatures of the wild. Animals, if you will. It was okay if I nursed him by himself, but if Jessica Wakefield was hungry or I tried to nurse the two of them together – forget it. It was devastating for both of us. Lizzie was sent home 3 weeks later, and then he was pretty much cut off completely. For a newly two-year old, he was extremely verbal and had a good understanding of the fact that I’d had babies and now they were home. There’s video of him welcoming Lizzie home that is about the sweetest thing in the world. But he was still, for better or worse, cut off from his biggest source of comfort before he was ready and it was a difficult, painful transition for us both. I remember very clearly one day, sitting on the sofa with both twins in my lap, and my beautiful, sweet boy standing in the front doorway of our house. “Mama, I want milk,” he said, and I said, “I know you do, baby.” And then he started crying, hard, and he said, “No, I really miss milk! and he just crumpled to the floor and cried and cried, so sad.

I tried to minimize the difficulty by keeping us busy. He loved going to his preschool three mornings a week in the fall, and we were adventurous while the girls were still immobile. We did an overnight in NYC while Brian Ropez was on a work trip with a small Maclaren stroller, a Baby Bjorn strapped to my front, and a Mei Tai on my back. I wasn’t afraid of nursing the girls in public, and I think most of Southern New Jersey saw most of my rack between 2004 and 2006. (Interestingly enough: maybe it’s because it was Jersey? But I’ve never once in my life had an adverse reaction to nursing openly.) And when he asked, I took him back into my bed.

so sleepy

Man, I’m such a Debbie Downer today! I created an all-new category of “not so funny” just for this entry! Maybe with my next post i can bring it down just a little bit further, talking about nursing in the NICU and nursing preemies before we bring it back up again and go through the science of why it’s not only physiologically good to breastfeed, but also brings lots of joy. Also on the docket is why how a woman births is important for her long-term breastfeeding success and the exciting world of being a maternal care advocate. Now, if you’ll excuse me – I have a Zhu Zhu Pets coloring book waiting for me.

Here’s an article about breastmilk, because it’s awesome, and how the sugars in it protect the wee developing gut of a newborn.

So I promised myself that this week I would post something each day about breasts and the milk that they make to, like, symbolize the years I’ve spent nursing. That total, in case you are curious, is just over 8.5 years. So that’s why I’m hoping it’s actually breastfeeding MONTH instead of breastfeeding WEEK, because 8.5 divided by 7 leaves a remainder of one and a half days, and I can’t do that blogological math.

So I started breastfeeding in 2002. Much like the ideas of “use a midwife and birth center” and “don’t have any drugs during labor” and “we can’t afford a childbirth class,” it wasn’t something that I really thought much about ahead of the actual time when I had a baby that I needed to affix to a nipple. Of mine. On my body. My pregnancy had been somewhat accidental, and in the style of most of my major life decisions, breastfeeding kind of fell under the category of “fuck it, why not?” I’d been on unemployment after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, and we were weaning ourselves down to one income anyway. Formula seemed like a lot of expensive, tedious work, and I already hated to wash dishes. I don’t know how to accurately describe the fact that I simply wasn’t thinking about it; I just kind of made the decision somewhere along in the pregnancy and I assumed that it would all be well and good and that having a baby was kind of like having a cat only a little different and that breastfeeding would happen without any effort on my part, just as my growing belly had been straining at the belly panel of my maternity jeans without any input from me.

(Note: I am sure that if this were some sort of collaborative blog, Brian Ropez would interject immediately to let you know, in fact, that my expanding pregnancy waistline was more from the 3 spiral-cut hams I ingested singlehandedly in the days after our wedding reception and not from the growing boy inside me.)

We drove to the birth center after my sister in law heard me howling over the phone. Her advice of, “Wow, she sounds like she’s getting NAILED. You guys should probably head in!” was pretty spot-on. I hit transition in the car, and arrived almost completely dilated. A few hours later my son was set to arrive – but I wasn’t letting him. I fought the urge to push, not realizing what it was. Finally, my sweet midwife Melanie asked me what I was afraid of, and I yelled, “I feel like I’m going to split in half!” She said that of course I wouldn’t, that I should focus my vocalizing inward instead of a chesty yell, and a couple pushes later in my gravity-licious squat-a-riffic birth stool, I was holding my baby and I felt AMAZING.

Orgasmic afterbirth

But I had to be stitched a tiny bit (once I got the hang of things, I pushed too fast and too hard – whoops!) so Brian Ropez and his BFF, Justin Timberlake, carried him around like a wrapped up little burrito. There was no breast crawl, no immediate skin-to-skin contact. I didn’t nurse him within the first hour after his birth. Justin left, the midwife and nurse went about their business, Brian Ropez passed out stone cold to the world after all the hard work he’d done, and I just stayed awake, staring at my hook-nosed baby. I don’t even think I’d gotten him to latch on by the time I left the birth center 12 hours later.

Thankfully, my guy had jaundice. We had to take a trip into the pediatrician’s office every day for a week to get a heel stick. Each day they would ask if my milk had come in. I’m sure I looked confused as I had absolutely no idea if it had come in, and they assured me that I would know. “It’s okay that it hasn’t happened yet. Your baby is fine; he’s not starving. Look at him! He’s a little yellow, but he’s beautiful!” They were so confident that it would work. That I could do it. They never once offered me formula samples, never once suggested that we just supplement a little until my milk came in. After four days, I was still dry and his rooting seemed more desperate. Still, they reassured me that we were fine. I cried and begged Brian Ropez to at least get a pacifier – all this sucking was driving me crazy. I think he brought three; the baby rejected them all. Repeatedly.

They weren’t kidding when they said I would know when my milk came in. Who didn’t know? Everyone could fucking tell because my tits were the size of Ohio and with three layers of cloth nursing pads, I still soaked through layers of T-shirts. I was constantly spraying milk all over the place no matter where we were, and if it wasn’t shooting like a fire hydrant in the city on a hot summer day, it was soaking through my shirts and dripping to the floor. Letdown felt like a zing! that made my toes curl every time it happened. A hot shower made me let down. The baby crying made me let down. The bus pulling up to the corner made me let down. I would let down picking out a bag of carrots at the grocery store. I would squeeze my breast tight to keep it from letting down while I ordered Chinese in Hoboken. I let down all over the NY Waterways Ferry probably 30,000 times. 1700 Kennedy Blvd. in Union City – it’s a fucking palace – was covered from ceiling to floor with my very own liquid gold.

Gerald Feldman Photography

My baby showed his appreciation in little baby snorts. He would make noises like a little pig, shaking his head back and forth quickly as he opened his mouth near my nipple. It reminded me of an animal killing prey, breaking its neck by shaking it before devouring it. It took a few weeks to adjust to our new routine, but soon we were a team: Leaky and Snort.

It was the encouragement of our pediatrician that kept me going during those early days, not only when I didn’t yet have milk but later when sleep was but a memory and my 24-hour cluster feeder cluster fed. The doctor would hold my son up in his hands, with reverence apparent, as he checked out his tiny newborn baby body. This is the only time in someone’s life that you can hold their entire being in your two hands. He would sniff his baby belly, stroke his baby hair. His appraisal of my first born filled me with a strange sense of pride, and of course made me let down all over the exam table and floor. They told me he was perfect and that he was beautiful and that what I was doing was just right and exactly what he needed, and it made all the difference in the world.

Funny, she doesn't *look* angry!

That our fight wasn’t escalating was confusing to her.

“It’s not my job to control you. It’s to teach you. To help you learn and grow.”

I admit that my approach to raising my kids isn’t necessarily conventional. But – damn – YOU try offering someone a time-out stool when you’re already outnumbered by the time your oldest kid is 2 and we’ll see how it goes, eh? Besides, I like to give my kids – yes, all of them – the benefit of the doubt.

It is my hope that by loving them and talking to them and holding them and hugging them and helping them to work through their emotions and find appropriate ways to deal with them that they will grow into teenagers who continue to communicate with their parents and later into grownups who can navigate their way in the world without throwing temper tantrums. I’ll tell you – I’ve seen lots and lots of grownups throwing temper tantrums and it surely ain’t pretty!

So I can’t control my kids. But I *can* manage their expectations in an effort to encourage them to control themselves. We’ll talk about that some other time, eh?

Also on deck: strategy vs. tactics when it comes to maternal health reform. BAM! Just wait, I’ll get smart on you yet!

In the meantime, it’s been a long, hot, melty week. Lots of bad behavior. Saturday, in fact, was pretty much wasted in UglyTown. This video starts with what looks like a stomping, doesn’t it? Like they are shit-kicking their older brother by the fireplace. Apparently it was all just a big game, but we’d been in the house most of the day and there had already been so many fights that I was just kind of curled up on the sofa with my hands over my poor, tender ears, crying as I rocked back and forth. But of course within seconds the laptop-camera being held aloft was spotted and then they were all over me.

So today we hit the Swedish Playground and had an hour of solace while the Wakefields tore up the Smaland, and then we housed their salad bar and the mac-n-cheese. There is nothing better than a joint where a vegetarian family of six can eat for under ten bucks, seriously!

Because it’s Sunday and we’re looking at a busy week ahead, I am going to leave you with the “what’s in my open browser windows” wrap-up. I’ll even be kind and give you some thoughts on each.

The difference between I can’t and I won’t when it comes to breastfeeding. As a breastfeeding counselor and hopeful IBCLC, this is really important reading for me. My tit has been in someone’s mouth a few hours a day for about 8 years now, but I don’t judge other women for not breastfeeding. I DO think that with more education and more motherfucking support, yo that more women would breastfeed for longer.

Babble. I’ve recently been introduced to Babble and I read it in a trainwreck, rubber-necking kind of way. It’s true.

The Case for an Older Woman As a cougar of a certain age, I will argue that this is the best piece of statistical writing accompanied by pretty graphs I have EVER seen, EVER. YES. I agree wholeheartedly with everything in here, especially the fancy graphs with the little slidey bars. When I write my letter to my 20-something self (you know, when I finally can without being afraid of copyright issues) it will include stuff like, “DUDE, LIGHTEN UP. FUCK MORE.”

As I said on The Twitter today, This fine piece here leaves me with my jaw a little dropped, because a) I thought bush was back in? and b) I can’t afford all that wax, not now, not in 5 years. Waxing and the mani/pedi, for me, are kind of like college planning in my little parenting bubble. Sorry, kids, we were too busy feeding you and keeping a roof over your heads to bother with [saving for college, pre-pubescent waxing, piano lessons.]

Death By M&Ms! No, it’s not like Death By Chocolate. So sad. It’s that our food and our culture and the speed and convenience and the chemicals are killing us. And this is coming from a girl who is in love with the new pretzel M&Ms.

Ok, Brian Ropez just lay down beside me with a turkey baster and is looking at me expectantly. I need to go figure out what this is all about. If you don’t hear from me in 12 hours, call in the Coast Guard.

Instead, I’m going to pretend to update the ol’ blog but I’m going to do it with photos and lists instead of a story. And I’m telling you about it up front so you can’t feel ripped off at the end. Deal?

I’m going to call this part “FoxyKate Cooks.” You won’t ever find me taking impeccable photos of the step-by-step process of how I put my most fabulous dishes together. This is in part because my camera sucks ass (it’s red and it was $89) and partly because my kitchen sucks worse ass (the dude that built it by hand was VERY PROUD of himself + all the surplus 1970s McDonald’s bathroom tile that he managed to score. He threw it on the floor, the countertop, AND the walls. I won’t lie, I ask my kids if they “want fries with that,” all the time. Never having BEEN to McDonald’s, they don’t understand.)

Regardless, I love to cook. And thankfully, I am married to a guy who likes to show off the camera-phonability of whatever fancy phone he has. He’s gotten tired of taking pictures of the kids so sometimes he’ll email me photos of the food I cook.

God, my life is boring.

Ok, so here we go!

A good breakfast is the foundation for any good day.

So a kid breakfast burrito usually consists of eggs, cheese & veggie sausage, but if you’re over 18 you might also find sauteed onions & spinach, peppers, fresh tomatoes, avocado, smoked cheese, peach salsa – the possibilities are as endless as the pantry.

Challah!

We don’t eat much in the way of lunch here in the Jimenez house. Lizzie dislikes peanut butter (except in cereal form) and although everyone else will happily eat PB&J I feel bad giving her a jelly sandwich when she’s the one who is so tiny for her age. So we’ll do apple/cheese/nut/hummus buffets, that kind of thing. Plus, Brian is never here so we don’t have a lunchtime photographer.

But dinner! Dinner is the meal that vexes me the most. I’m a girl who likes to serve a hot meal. If you’re not at the table when dinner is on, then fuck you. Reheating food makes me sad. It loses something. Any living food has lost its energy. I mean, whatever, because I guess cooking takes it away, too. Maybe reheating it diminishes the love. I do love to cook from scratch, but it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like (who has TIME?!) so I openly admit that I’ll embellish packaged foods.

This shit was delicious.

And for dessert? Hot milk sponge cake. Try to say that and not have it in your head as the Spongebob theme song. I double dog dare you.

It's the best day ever!

My father in law is a good guy. He and I come from polar opposite ends of the political and idealogical spectrum, but he refrains from calling me a Socialist and I bit my tongue (but rolled my eyes) all through the Bush administration, so it’s all good. He is so very good to his grandchildren, pushing them on the swings and playing hide and seek. He encourages their imaginations and problem solving skills, giving them projects to do in the yard and in the house, looking for clues to mysteries and collecting crab apples or cherries from the fruiting trees in the yard. My inlaws bought an ill-timed swingset for their backyard and hoped Brian and his brother could put it together, but between Tony’s shiftwork and Brian’s brand newborn preemie twins, it just never happened. So now the frame sits out there housing wasps nests with two swings on it and the sliding board perched dangerously across two of the cross-beams, and the kids LOVE it. My father-in-law is the only person who has the patience to stay with them for ages as they hang from the top bar and shimmy from swing to swing and try to balance on the slide and then jump down, panting and terrified. They love him so much.

Anyway, he’s a good guy and a few years ago I heard that strawberry shortcake is his favorite. I can’t bake for shit, and I’ve tried and brought along a couple of terrible strawberry-based baked goods on or around his birthday/Father’s day. I’ve been having a hankering for berries myself this year, and thought I’d give it another go. The first recipe I pulled up was some sort of Paula Deen disaster – 127-5 star reviews with a prep time of 5 minutes? What? It sounds too good to be true! Well, it is. Because America is so fucking lazy. Open a full-of-preservatives angel food cake! Pop open a tub of hydrogenated Kool Whip and slop it on top! Sweet sexy Jesus, people, bake a fucking cake.

My friend Angela, who is a *fantastic* and humble cook, came to the rescue and sent me her grandmother’s recipe to a “hot milk sponge cake.” See the link above – it’s the closest thing I found on the web to what she sent; I cannot wantonly hand out her centuries-old family recipe.

Holy CRAP, was this cake good. For all the sugar in it, it surprisingly didn’t taste sweet. Queen Super Baby and I made some sort of raspberry sauce by blending up berries and straining out the seeds, and we layered that and some macerated berries between the layers. I don’t think we slopped any more on top, but that’s a pint of freshly whipped cream (with a smidge of powdered sugar & vanilla) on top with lots more fresh berries. Too bad my oven is broken, because I’d whip that shit up again RIGHT NOW if it weren’t.

So there’s the food we’ve been eating lately. I’ll follow up later with a reading list of books and websites! Yes!

I can’t believe that I titled a post “three bitches in a bathtub” and then never once wrote about how I have finally – after all this time – figured out that herding the girls into one small tub and trying to hose them all down at one time is infinitely less effective than 1:1 shower ratio. I don’t know how I didn’t think of it sooner, what with each of them loving to call me into the bathroom “to sit and talk” while they’re taking a shit. OF COURSE they are cooperative when they don’t outnumber me. DUH. Your takeaway from this? Milkstained: Funny *and* informative!

One of the things I think I love most about my kids is their dedication to calling things by their proper names. My son, Skippy, has a pretty long Spanish name (think Lady Gaga) that can be shortened to a number of English derivatives. He experimented with it last year, but has gone back to the full thing. We have a fair that goes on every year up the street from us at a local church, and they can’t just call it “the fair.” It’s “We are so excited! We are going to go to the Saint Aloysius Gonzaga Fair!” and when a neighbor or family member or friend asks about the fair, they’re like, “Do you mean the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Fair? Yes! We can’t wait to go to the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Fair! The St. Aloysius Gonzaga Fair is the most bestest fair in the whole wide world! Long live the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Fair!”

Onward! To the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Fair!

So we had a pretty fantastic time at the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Fair this year. Last year was a little dicey – perhaps we went too close to bedtime, or maybe our mistake was waiting until the sun was going down to get into the interminably long line for the Ferris Wheel. All I know is that we had two little girls disrespectfully running amok in the St. Aloysius Gonzaga cemetery, trying to climb headstones and play hopscotch on the inlaid stones. Nice. It ended poorly, with kicking and screaming and threats and no Ferris Wheel for anyone.

But this year was different! Juggling the kids on rides has always been difficult: the Wakefield twins suffered Twin to Twin Transfusion during our pregnancy, and as a result were born 30% different in size. This worked out to a little over a pound and a half at birth, but has translated into several inches in height and about 12-14 pounds at age six. These days, people often think that I had my children one after the other, four years in a row. It makes me sad when I’ll pull out something for Queen Baby to wear and the smaller of the Wakefields will say, “Oh, I wore that when *I* was a baby!” and meanwhile, she wore it like a month ago. But she is smart and funny and we evaded so many long-term health problems for them both but by the grace of God and Dr. Tom Brewer that being denied entry to carnival rides and Ikea’s Smaland until the advanced age of five hardly seems like a problem. To me, anyway. Still, after Queen Baby was born – and even while I was pregnant – we always had the issue of who could ride which rides and who needed a grownup and did we have to stand in line twice and so on and so on and so on.

THE ZIPPER

It didn’t really hit me, though, that this is a big transition. It wasn’t until we had Discussions and Negotiations in line about the Ferris Wheel (always with the fucking Ferris Wheel!) and we acknowledged that we’d probably have to wait in line a million times and divvy up the riders that I noticed that the measuring stick was a lot shorter than I thought. I walked Queen Baby over to it and stood her next to it and my jaw dropped when she came in at about an inch over! So instead, we waited in line once and divided ourselves three to a car. I wish I could tell you who else was in mine, but the only clear memory I have of the rest of the ride is feeling sheer panic as we got stuck high in the air, looking at the ceiling of the St. Aloysius Gonzaga Primary School, realizing that all my sweet little 2-year-old had to do was NOT REALIZE and try to climb out and she’d be toast. But she didn’t! She sat! She was so perfectly awesome. Awesomely awesome. And there’s video footage of it somewhere, but spinning around on that stupid ride was the hardest and loudest I’d laughed in probably a year. Honestly, it was so fantastic that I went on to send Brian home with the baby & kept the older three there to eat our fill of funnel cakes and water ice for a whole other hour.

I don’t have anything music-y that I’ve been listening to, but #4 is always good for a laugh when she’s dressed in goggles and plopped in front of the webcam.

And for good measure, here’s the links I have open on all my browser tabs RIGHT NOW! Yes! I’m sure it tells you something sordid about my psyche.
The Spoon Theory
Dirty Baby
The KFC Double Down
and
Lumosity.

Enjoy!

So this past week my husband started a new job. He’s been working from home for the past 6+ months, and although to his face I will deny it until I breathe my last breath, it has truly been an enormous help to have a second adult in the house most of the time, even holed up behind a locked door pretending not to hear the fights over Silly Bandz or a mother’s anguished tears as she’s berated yet again for cooking fried eggs the wrong way. So his commute is back up to an hour (give or take) each way, which leaves me on solo-homemaker duty from about 7:30 AM to almost 7PM. It’s fine; I’ve done it before and I can do it again. Lord knows there are a gazillion single moms out there doing way more work than I’m doing. But I am a tender and delicate baby, so bear with me while I cry myself a mini-river here..

Actually, it was the kids doing the crying. We are usually the Leave it to Beaver family sitting around the dining room table together, strengthening our (liberal) Family Values over our local, organic, lacto-ovo meal. The kids do a thing in the morning at school called “Morning Meeting” so we even go so far as to hold “Evening Meeting” at dinnertime. Someone will begin the meeting by turning to the person next to them and saying, “Good evening, Mama!” and then you say good evening back, of course, because it’s only polite to respond when spoken to. The usual question is, “What was your favorite part of the day?” but sometimes we’ll mix it up (like in the morning on the weekends) with, “What are you hoping to do today?” or “what was your favorite part of ______?”

Topic: Martin Luther's 95 Theses. Discuss!

The best part of the meeting is that Queen Super Baby got *totally* into it and had all the right sentences down by the time she was about two. I used to do a voice for her – something like a cross between what I imagine the Britney Spears voice from the Go Fug Yourself girls to be mixed with a little bit of Mister Hankey thrown in there for good measure. The back story of Queen Baby’s voice is that when she was born, the Wakefield Twins were *constantly* asking when she would “walk and talk and play.” They were three; what the hell did they know about baby development? But the really cool thing about them being 3 as opposed to my son only being 2 when THEY were born is that everyone was SO TOTALLY INTO what Queen Baby would actually be doing. So Queen Baby started narrating her life – “well, today, you see, I’m gawna be makin’ mahself some poop soup.” It was especially helpful if someone was trying to knock her over or be unkind. “Stop it! In the name of the law! Jessica Wakefield, you unhand me or I’ll call the sheriff!” and what kills me is that they would always fall for it.

So Queen Baby would put on this very thoughtful face and she would tilt her head to the side and she would put her finger on her chin and say, “Hmmm…thinking, thinking.” and then she would stand up on the bench (when you get past 3 kids, honestly, benches are a way better dinner table option) and throw her arms in the air and yell, “I know! My fave-it partoftheday was MomMom’s house!” And like 9 times out of 10 we hadn’t been to MomMom’s house in DAYS, but whatever. And then she would turn to the next person and in this very quiet, very thoughtful voice say, “Good evening, what favorite part of the day was?”

So back to the part about my terrible life, right? So it was a tough week of readjustment for everyone. By the time breakfast rolled around every morning, he was already gone. And then when it was time for dinner, nobody was interested in sitting down with me, because they’re all sick of me after 10 hours, even with school, right? So a few nights saw fights and tears at the dinner table, a lot of “I miss Papa, wah wah wah.” And then on Friday, he went out for drinks with some folks after work and we weren’t real clear on what the return-home situation was. I’d let the Wakefield twins skip school on Friday – ridiculously, we still have over a week left – because we’d met up with some friends at this fantastic little park nearby and there was just no way we were getting out of there on time to eat lunch and get to school. Instead, we played and played and played (I’m still sore!) and then hit a burrito joint nearby for some lunch with our friends. They were begging for ice cream, but I convinced them to wait for their brother to be done school. In my mind, I figured we’d go have some dinner with the grandparents, get some ice cream, and go for the opening concert at a local park that hosts a summer music festival. I overestimated myself, and instead, I found myself caving to the idea of the ice cream man.

Quick, sight-sing it!

You know the one…ol’ Mister Softee, who has driven through my neighborhood and practically parked his singing truck on my lawn right at bedtime as he doles out the cones to “everyone but us!” When I told them we were getting ICE CREAM TRUCK ICE CREAM, their eyes went wide like saucers and I heard at least six, “Really? Really really?”s before they believed me. But then Mister Softee gave me the shaft: that fucker didn’t show. I ask you: What the hell kind of ice cream truck shows up every night for three weeks right as I am putting my kids to bed, but then doesn’t show on the night that we are sitting on the corner a block from our home, catching lightning bugs and throwing ourselves all over the sidewalk with unrestrainable anticipation? The ice cream truck of the Devil, that’s who.

(As an aside – when I was looking for a Mister Softee image, apparently a few of the websites play the Mister Softee jingle when you open them. I was having internet issues last night, and had forgotten that the page was loading…so when I heard the faint tingle of the jingle, I looked at my clock, aghast – 10:40PM!! – and was ready to grab a bat and go outside and kick some ass!)

So it ended up being a pretty rough night. There were 8 little feet dragging along the sidewalk as we moped back to the house. Jessica, who is always in such firm control of her emotions, threatened me with a pair of my own shoes held high over her head. Eventually sweet little Elizabeth was the one who prevailed, saying, “Maybe he was sick. I bet he ate too much ice cream and so he was sick,” and I promised them that we could go out today instead.

And we did! It took us the first 8 hours of the day to eat breakfast, play with neighbors, do some laundry, play some Wii, get dressed, throw a couple temper tantrums, pee on the floor, make a Trader Joe’s run, drop some waffles off to the great-grandparents, and drive out to the next county over, but we got some of the tastiest ice cream on earth.

It even sounds heavenly.

We had a swell time, and this morning everyone is still talking nostalgically about what a fantastic day it was yesterday. I have to get my little budding Quakers ready for Meeting (because what is a 5 minute janut turns into a 20 minute commute with those two) but I’ll leave you with the proof:

No, you put YOUR ice cream into MY mouth

Geneva's Chocolate Bliss

We arrived at the hotel somewhat late – the car service that Fox sent to us arrived after my husband got home from work, and we were running even later because I’d had to drop everyone off for happy fun sleepover time at the grandparents’ house. I settled in to the room while Carlos ran out to get us takeout from Zen Palate, which I see has now expanded to Princeton? Who knew!? We sat on the floor and ate sweet potato fries and I sucked down sweet and sour gluten globs and then I nursed the baby and we all fell into hotel sleep.

We were up super duper early so we could all be at the station before 6AM. It was over a year ago and there was so much hustle and bustle that I don’t remember a whole lot of the green room experience, other than that nobody was really talking to each other and there were lots of people with headsets on rushing about looking either terrified or angry. There was another family there with three kids, and I figured that they must be the other family with a “busy mom.” I helped myself to a bagel and got a fruit plate together for the wee one. I was confused when the family got taken away long before I thought we were supposed to go on – turns out they were there for an entirely different segment. It began to dawn on me that there wasn’t a panel of busy moms present, but that I was *it.* I started to feel uncomfortable.

All hell broke loose when I went to get my makeup on. The woman with the brushes worked magic, and we chatted a bit about massage & makeup & she said something that really stuck with me – that putting on makeup is like putting on one of these shows: you’re only showing them what you want to be seen. It was right around then that I noticed the little pile of papers on the desk in front of me that had my name on it and lots and lots of handwritten notes. “Martyr” caught my eye. “Self-esteem, psychological profile, and making her life hectic in order to become irreplaceable” caught my other eye. Pretty soon my chest was tight and I was looking a little like Marty Feldman trying to keep up with all the horseshit nonsense that had been written about me, my husband, and my family by a psychologist who I’d never met.

This is for the kids.

So they still sent us out there. I sat balanced very, very carefully on this very tall stool right next to ol’ Kathy Ireland while they showed the video that we’d shot earlier in the week. There was the manufactured bad behavior, a close up of the tater tots. My favorite was the dreamy shot of me sitting on our front windowsill, gazing outside at the world I apparently no longer ever have access to. One hand on the window, OH GOD, it was so very sad. There was some happy chit-chat, I was presented with Kathy Ireland’s book. Mike and Juliet worked very hard to talk to me as we cut to a commercial so I wouldn’t hear the voiceover…which said something to the effect of, “when we come back, we’ll meet Kathleen’s douchebag of a husband who can’t get off his ass and help out around the house.” and THEN they had the balls to say, “or maybe it’s all in her head. They moved the happy douchebag to the front row of the audience, and he and I locked eyes and gave each other the thumbs up.

When they came back from commercial, they tried to turn it on us: that I am controlling, that I feel like I *have* to do everything around the house because I am a martyr to motherhood. Not once did anyone acknowledge that having four kids in five years, that living on one income, that having twins – or preemies – might actually be difficult for anyone, regardless of circumstance. When Mike asked me if I truly thought Carlos wouldn’t love me if I did so much around the house, I said, “Well, Mike – of course he wouldn’t. He started threatening at least five years ago to leave me for a 21 year old if I couldn’t shape up!” When they posed a question to Carlos, he replied that he sits around drinking beer and ordering me about. We refused to give them the “gotcha!” they were looking for. They shuffled me off the stage pretty quickly, and brought out Jamie Kennedy. I realized later that we were supposed to be on for longer but they cut us and dragged Mr. Kennedy out for 2 segments so we couldn’t further ruin the plan. I returned home feeling sucker-punched and disappointed, and you KNOW that Kathy Ireland’s book was a poor substitute for my fantasy parting gift of 3 months of housecleaning services!

Sometimes a pill is just a pill.

As a quick therapeutic exercise, I popped out the following to the psychologist, and pressed send hours later after talking to a friend who’d suffered severe PPD:

Dr. Debbie –

PS – A little background research goes a long way; my 7 year old is a boy.

And I ask you this, in all seriousness: How does what they did help moms? The name of the book being promoted is Real Solutions for Busy Moms. My biggest concern was that a new mom sitting at home, trapped under a breastfeeding baby, unable to reach the remote, crying postpartum tears, might see that segment and think that if someone in my situation was overwhelmed & being told it was all in my head, what is she supposed to think? That having a newborn baby is easy? That she should dry her tears and just carry on? That what she was going through is *nothing* and that she just needs to pull up her maternal bootstraps and suck it up, because it’s all in her head?

I actually did end up having a good and productive conversation with the psychologist. With the producers? Not so much. I will admit that I felt a little, small piece of satisfaction when the show was cancelled a few months later. I’m sad that I wasn’t able to lift the video evidence for my own library. And although I’d already been doing it for a while – volunteering as a breastfeeding counselor, teaching newborn massage – it was at this point that I realized that I was, for lack of a better term, being pushed to a purpose-driven life (minus Rick Warren & Jesus) of helping moms & helping babies.

With that, I’ll leave you with a completely unrelated music video. My husband laughs at me because despite having grown up a musician, I know NOTHING of artists and songs, and every now and then I’ll say something ridiculously stupid like, “Hey, have you ever heard of Modest Mouse? I like them!” So, Spoon? Do you know them already? I didn’t.