What I Have Learned in the Last Month

Being one of those people that researches and tries to be as educated about everything as possible, including having a baby, here are things I have learned from Gus about having a baby in the last month.

1. Sometimes babies cry for no reason and there is nothing you can do about it. Sometimes they cry for hours and there is nothing you can do about it...for hours.

2. You wanting them to sleep in their own bed is a nice theory, but if the baby doesn't agree you better have a good set of earplugs, a heart of stone, and no desire to sleep. Or, alternatively, you could be a man and have an amazing ability to tune out the sound of a baby's screams.

3. You wanting them to sleep at night is a nice theory, but if the baby doesn't agree you will learn to love stores that are open 24 hours so that you can sleep all day or see No. 2 above

4. You can go without sleep or food but not both (learned this in college but have definitely gotten a refresher course the last few weeks).

5. If you are cloth diapering, you will do laundry every other day whether you or the baby like it or not.

6. Zebra cakes only get you so far in fulfilling the need for food.

7. Your spouse volunteering to spend time away from you will seem like a really romantic gesture when he keeps the screaming child with him so you can sleep.

8. Someone else's poop on your hands isn't nearly as gross as you thought it was.

9. Someone else throwing up on you isn't nearly as gross as you thought it was.

10. There is something endlessly entertaining about watching a baby sleep.

11. You really can cry from happiness.

12. Sympathetic rocking and bouncing when someone else is holding your crying child makes you look like a loon, but is uncontrollable.

13. When you find that one thing that makes their face light up with a toothless grin, you will do it over and over and over again until they want to do something different even if that means you clap their hands together and swoop kisses on them for an hour. I find that it makes me grin too.

14. Stretch marks really aren't that bad.

15. Being organized really really really helps...you think you are going to get more done than you will in actuality.

16. It really can take an hour to run to the store for milk, it is better to ask hubby to pick it up on the way home .

17. Find a really great Chinese place that delivers or you will end up having Zebra cakes, crackers and coffee for dinner more than you will admit to other people.

18. Hairy ears are really cute if you aren't considering the person as a potential mate.

19. Even though you may hate vacuuming, you will do it every day if it puts your kid to sleep.

20. There are really only five household chores that really need to be kept up with, the rest can slide a little: laundry, dishes, taking out trash, keeping the living room picked up, and feeding the furry creatures.

21. Allow three times as much time as you will think you will need to do anything...and get used to being late.

22. Crying because your one month old is 'so big' also makes you look like a loon but people tend to understand.

23. You can, living in a house with multiple mirrors, manage to go a week without ever looking in one and not realize it. You can also leave the house and not realize until you are somewhere that you have slippers on and you forgot to comb your hair but at least the kid is wearing a really cute outfit and has his hair is combed!

24. You have deeper levels of love than you thought. I thought that I loved my spouse with every fibre of my being, but I have never cried because his belly hurts, I have never gone a week without sleep because he needed to be held, and I have never panicked over every minute that passes because it is one less minute I will have with him. I'm not saying it is more than what I feel for Rob, but it is completely different and the magnitude and depth of it takes my breath away. It is like the first time you feel the Holy Ghost in you and your previous conceptions of love are blown away, not made insignificant, but you realize how much more of you there is and it enriches your existing relationships. Hard to describe but I thought I would try...

25. You realize the true meaning of words. Like when your parents said "You were a colicky baby," colic, which you have heard is terrible and exhausting, really is terrible, exhausting and mostly heartbreaking because this baby is obviously hurting and there is nothing I can do about it. And then there is people telling you that childbirth is painful, which may be the biggest understatement ever, but there really is no way to convey that to another person with words. While this is what I have always wanted to do and I am so happy to finally be on that path, there are things that I never blinked at before, I am suddenly terrified of. The gross magnitude to which I underestimated innocuous sounding words like 'childbirth' and 'colic' leave me scared to death of other dreaded stages like 'terrible twos' and 'teenager' and 'free will' and 'independence.' And from what I can tell, none of these things utilize skills picked up in previous trials. I don't think my rock and walk skills will help much with terrible twos. I do have hope that we will figure it out when it comes and in the meantime I am trying not to borrow trouble or think about it too much.

Books lull you into thinking that you can have and raise children with competence and dignity. What I have learned in the last month is that this is a lie.

Quotables

"There are always at least two sides to an argument, I take pride in seeing the third, more absurd side of any binary choice."

--Scott Gentry

Money Diatribe

Money is only a tool. it will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. it will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has not concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgement , ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the chats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money.

-Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged

Give that Girl a Twinkie!

"My body is a temple and sometimes my temple wants cheesecake."

Chaos Studies Pt. 2

The house fell apart over the holidays. I had almost gotten it put back together when we left for Chicago. Now there are four loads of laundry on my guest bed that I have been getting dressed out of and I just did dishes for the first time in a week. I don't understand why it is so hard to keep it picked up. For the most part we put things away when we use them so why can't we ever permanently defeat entropy? I have a theory.

Chaos is a natural byproduct of the imperfect human condition. When we have had a rough day, we 'owe' it to ourselves to come home from work and 'relax,' i.e. veg on the couch, read a book, play online, basically anything but clean house. Unfortunately, we find it difficult to relax in chaos and our days get more and more stressful until we have had enough and take care of the root problem. I am going to have to start doing housework before work again which means...I am going to have to get up earlier than I like...

I remember the good old days when the house seemed to clean itself. Of course, I also remember the conspicuous lack of homework too...I think I am going to blame it on being in school in order to divest myself of personal responsibility and control of the situation. Yeah, that'll work...

Lazy Mondays

Which, incidentally, follows lazy Sundays. Syra came over so we could help each other Tonight we had Pad Thai, attempted to be productive, failed miserably and are now both playing on our blogs.

Found an awesome quote for the new year
What reinforcement we may gain from hope.
If not, what resolution from despair.
-Milton, Paradise Lost

Current reading selections include Paradise Lost and a book called Couch about three roommates and their couch that will not let them put it down. Just read the Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy that reveals a very distorted philosophical view...abstinence even in marriage?...children just propagating human misery and abnormal behaviors? What a difference in his outlook from the beginning of his life to the end. The Kreutzer Sonata was written just a couple years before his death. Interesting.

Hmmm

Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility...

--Faith and History
Reinhold Nieburh