Just in case you thought I was kidding...

... about Gavin's very strong aversion to all things grooming-related.  Here is a picture of Gavin's first professional haircut.  No toddlers were harmed in the making of this haircut but one hairdresser almost lost a finger.

30 Week Update

Well, T-minus ten weeks and counting. Well, knowing my uterus, t-minus twelve weeks and counting. I had my doctor's appointment yesterday and all is well. Grace was head down but considering I have felt her hiccups by my ribcage all day, I would say she has flipped around since then. Her heart rate was perfect and aside from the fact I'm the Incredible Expanding Woman, all is well with me. It is kind of weird because in comparing my chart with Gavin's pregnancy to this pregnany, all my numbers are practically the exact same. My weight gain month to month is the exact same, the results of my glucose tolerance test are the exact same and my hemoglobin levels have been the exact same. Queen of consistency... that's me.

Lloyd has been busy preparing the house and the bonus room has been painted a sunny yellow (I'll post pics as soon as we are done with it) and he is getting ready to start on Gavin's room. He is going to have a surfer theme and for the record, I came up with the idea to do his room in a surfer theme MONTHS before the most recent Pottery Barn Kids magazine came out with all the surfer stuff. PBK ripped me off! Just so we have that straight. Here is what his bedding will look like:

http://www.ababysplace.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=75

We're trying to decide what to paint his room (I'm thinking of blue but blue is so not original) and what color curtains to use (I like either orange or purple but Lloyd has vetoed both colors). Any suggestions? I painted some wooden letters that spell GRACE pink and I plan on hanging them by ribbon over her crib. Thank goodness we aren't naming her Alexandria or something. Geez, I am so not artsy craftsy. Besides, I'm in charge of growing the baby. I'm doing enough!

Gavin has learned how to take off his diaper. I was on the phone with Lloyd the other day and he said he needed to get off the phone fast because Gavin had taken of his diaper and was pushing it around in his dump truck. Hee hee.... that's some kind of load he was carrying. Gavin and I have both gotten the worst haircuts of our lives in the past two weeks. Ugh... I have total mom hair. It is so short and choppy and if I hear one more time how practical this haircut will be when I have two kids I swear I'm going to hurt someone. I'm sory but there is nothing more easy to take care of than pony-tail friendly hair. Wash, towel dry, pull back in a pony tail. Voila... I'm ready for work. Now I actually have to style my hair and use products and special brushes and bobby pins and ugh..... grow hair grow! Gavin's bad haircut is his own fault. He wouldn't quite screaming and having a nervous breakdown long enough for the chic to even remotely do anything even to his hair. She just buzzed it all off and did absolutely no trimming around his ears or in the back. Lloyd and I evened it up a bit at home but the minute he hears the sound of the clippers he just loses it. He has the same aversion and reaction to fingernail clippers and tooth brushes. My little boy is one very difficult person to groom. Lloyd is in desperate need of a haircut but since bad things happen in threes, I think he'll be sporting his That 70's Show hair do for a few more weeks. Maybe someone else we know will get a bad haircut and he'll feel safe to get one of his own.

Until next time!!!!

Twin Theory

For those of you who may or may not know, Peggy, as well as Sarah, is pregnant with fraternal twins. She is about 8 weeks along and aside from her husband thinking sharp pencils make an excellent baby toy, she is doing great. The fact that two of my childhood best friends, who were also my college roomates for more than three years, are now both pregnant with twins is absolutely mind boggling. I mean, really, what are the odds? Being the scientific, analytical mind that I am, I have come up with a theory for this occurence of their silmutaneous twin pregnancies. Here goes....

I have determined that binge drinking and illegal drug use in one's early twenties, ingestion of $5 Pizzeria Italia Pizza, exposure to mice (dead or alive), and a short stature no greater than 5'4" are all associated with an increased risk of twin pregnancy in one's 29th year of life.

It is my hope these findings will be published shortly.

You Know You're Pregnant When...

You tell your husband:

"I didn't clean up the kitchen because you didn't bring me any McDonald's"

and it sounds like a perfectly reasonable and valid argument for not doing one's share of the housework.

Did I mention that I never even asked for McDonald's?

Unless????

I was driving home the other day and I notice a bumper sticker on the car in front of me:

Unless You’re A Hemorrhoid
Stay Off My A$$

Hmmmm…. I had to wonder. Why the “unless”? I mean, if we’re talking about keeping things off our a$$, why make an exception to anything… especially a hemorrhoid of all things. I don’t know if any of you have experienced hemorrhoids but after the joy of pregnancy and childbirth I can assure each and everyone of you that a hemorrhoid is not something you want to make an “unless” to on the list of things to keep off your a$$. I would like to see the bumper sticker revised to something like “Unless You’re Toilet Paper” or “Unless You’re Underwear”. It just makes so much more sense. Those are things I would make an exception to.

That bumper sticker really got me thinking about hemorrhoids, which then got me thinking about childbirth and post-partum in general. I write this knowing I have several friends who are pregnant for the first time and to you first time preggos, if you would like to continue to view the introduction to motherhood as rosy as a picture on a Hallmark card or the cover of American Baby Magazine, I would suggest you stop reading now (and thanks for reading this far). Childbirth really wasn’t that bad for me. Granted, I didn’t like being induced and the contractions cause by the Pitocin were really painful, pushing was totally and completely exhausting especially since I was starving, and having my rear ripped end to end wasn’t exactly pleasant but overall, it wasn’t that bad. I’m actually going to try and go natural this time by using Hypnobirthing. This sort of sucks for Lloyd since he will have to be my coach and actually do something whereas during my labor with Gavin, once the epidural was on place, he was free to go on as many Chick-Fil-A and Starbucks runs as he wanted and he didn’t even miss the Simpsons. I’m afraid that I’m going to be ruining Lloyd’s birth experience but as I always say, his sperm, his responsibility.

I also had really bad post partum depression after having Gavin. Perhaps a side-effect of the rear ripping from end to end and the subsequent hemorrhoids that ensued. Never mind one of the cruelest ironies of childbirth and for the rest of your life post partum is that it hurts to sit down- hurts really, really, really, really bad- yet all you do 23 ½ hours out of the day for the first 6 weeks is sit on your split, hemorrhoid-having a$$ and breastfeed a child. Add that to the fact I had the world’s most insane milk supply (La Leche League refers to is as overactive letdown…. I refer to it as geyser boobs) and had to slide down my ripped a$$ to lay on my back while I breastfed in the Australian hold where mom is “down under” to control the flow of milk and my a$$ was on FIRE!!!!!

Truth be told, fire a$$ and all, I can’t blame all the post partum depression on my rear. I’m sure it can be chalked up to any number of things. The one thing that bugs me the most about post partum depression is when people refer to it as the baby blues. Baby blues???? Telling a person who has post partum depression they are just a little blue it like telling a smoker cigarettes are just a little bit bad for them. In other words, it is a vast understatement. There were days and weeks after Gavin was born that Lloyd feared for his life. Rightly so, if you ask me, since it was HIS SPERM that started all of this! I feared for lots of things… namely the ability to ever feel happy again or feel normal or to just be a mother. Not that I’m really sure what normal feels like but I wanted to feel like I did prior to September 5- prior to the child being ripped from my body and taking with it every hormone that worked appropriately in my body and gave me the will to live… prior to the a$$ fire and the hemorrhoids and the bloody nipples… prior to me being so totally RESPONSIBLE for the most perfect and lovely child in the whole wide world who made me feel equal amounts of love and fear and desperation and left me so confused, sad, insecure, and very, very unworthy… and prior to my ever making the most wonderful husband in the world fear for his life.

I never have gone back to feeling how I did prior to September 5th and I couldn’t be happier. I feel so much better than I ever dreamed I could. I never knew it could be this wonderful and granted, like everything else in my life, I had to go down a somewhat crooked road to get here, but hemorrhoids and all, it is so totally, utterly, and completely worth it.

I Love My Kids and My Promise To You

Grace is officially grounded. That’s right. Grounded. She had the nerve to go almost 24 hours without kicking the living daylights out of my uterus thus leaving me to imagine 150 million horribly tragic scenarios as to what could be the cause of the drastic decrease in movements… most of which were centered around an umbilical cord gone awry. She started moving again this morning on the way to work as I sipped my caffeine free diet Dr. Pepper (yes, I know about the effect of phosphoric acid on calcium absorption… you can be assured that when a dietitian makes a less than perfect nutrition choice it is at least an informed choice) and listening to Lloyd’s Erasure c.d. It makes me boogie so like mother like daughter!

I took Gavin to church yesterday and for the first time, I left him in the church daycare. At first I was a little sad because he jumped right out of my arms into the arms of one of the daycare workers and immediately made himself at home without even a look back at his tearful mama. He went straight to a hot pink stroller (like father like son) and began pushing it around so I left to go attend church service. About ¾ of the way through the service I left to go check on the Gavinator and it is a good thing because he was being held by a woman in the hallway outside of the class (did I mention he was in the “walkers” class…. I told them he would be better suited for the “screamers” class if there was one available) and his face was red, the snot was dripping freely from his nose, crocodile tears were flowing down his cheeks and he was in mid-scream when he saw me. He reached out to me and all but threw himself into my arms, wrapped his arms and legs around me, and tried to burrow his head down my shirt. Poor little bug missed me. The whole time I felt like Sally Field accepting the Oscar: “You like me, you really like me!!!”. Either he really missed his mama or his inner demons were being angered by the attempts to instill a little bit of religion into his soul.

I love my kids. Gavin is the absolute light of my life and Grace isn’t even here yet and I love her so much. Heck, she doesn’t even have to be here for me to declare her grounded. I would so love to be a stay at home but I don’t think that would ever happen. Financially it just isn’t possible. I need to work. I know plenty of stay at home moms who work from home to make ends meet and while I’m friends with them, they are always trying to sell me something or get me to host a party or just tell a friend about some amazing product. If I had a slew of friends to call upon for a candle party or to tell about a miraculous new product that can repair damaged DNA, do you think I would be hanging out with your sorry butt while you try to hock me some of your snake oil??

My promise to you: If I ever do become a stay at home mom, I will not, repeat: will not, attempt to sell you something. I only ask for the same in return.

Why I Don't Get to Blog as Often As I Would Like

This is me attempting to blog and chat on the computer last night. Rrrrrrriiiiiiggggghhhhhtttt. I seemed to have sprouted a rather wiggly and grumpy tumor out of my back during my oh so brief time on the 'net who demanded me to get out of the chair and fetch the 145th handful of cheerios of the day. I know I'm bigger than him and on some days, I'm smarter than him so why is he the boss?? He is freakishly strong for an almost 19 month old. Plus, we can't forget disciplining Gavin means watching a child's head spin around while puking pea soup, all crucifixes within a 15 mile radius flipping upside down, the seas turning blood red, and screams....... oh dear God the screams....... that are so are so excruciating to hear that I don't doubt Grace is in my belly thinking I don't know who you people are or what you're doing to that boy, but I ain't ever comin' out.