little feet, big sky

Some days are better than others.

Some days, I can’t stand to be alive. I wake up to Spice pulling my hair, or kicking my chest and I want to just smother her with a pillow. I struggle to be cheery when she’s kept me up half the night and I’m anything but. I get annoyed with her easily and in turn, she spends most of the day randomly half-crying, as if to protest my sour mood. I’m tired and frustrated and spend the evening rushing through her bath, our dinner, and then to bed, just to start the whole damn cycle over again. I fall asleep thinking I can’t bear it, I can’t do this for even another day…

Some days, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have her and especially her. I’m in awe of how sweet she is, how enduring, how brilliant, how charming. I look at her and marvel that I have this amazing gem of a daughter, surely more wonderful than any daughter has ever been before. I cuddle her and play with her and think of strange things like how I wish I could just eat her cheeks, she’s so cute. I tuck her in close to me as I nurse her to sleep, wishing for just a moment we could freeze time and keep her small and safe like this forever.

So it goes. Some days are better than others.

In an effort to feel less guilty about getting my dream Calyx, I’m selling some of my less-used carriers. I love them, but Spice has just gotten too heavy for me to be comfortable carrying her in anything other than a really supportive SSC. *sigh*

Brown Moby wrap. Gently used and in great condition. $30 + $5/shipping (US).

OhMyMommyClementine Powder Pink Silver and Black reversible mei tai. Also gently used. Reversible to pink & black leopard print. $20 + $5/shipping (US).

Drop a note in the comments if you’re interested!

This past week had been amazing for me. (For me only, since I know the spouse-unit is struggling a little with the early wake-up times.) I’ve gotten to the gym regularly and have been totally energized run around behind Spice, cook, de-clutter the house and otherwise play Susie Homemaker. I attribute it to the following:

• Getting to the gym at least 4-5 times a week.
• Taking Omega-3′s, recently suggested to combat depression.
• Getting rid of our book clutter via Amazon and Paperbackswap.com.
• Finally getting this blog moved back to WP.org! (Many thanks to the spouse-unit for making it a two-day adventure instead of the two-month ordeal it would have been trying to do it on my own.)
• Snowball effect. The residual warm fuzzies from these things put me in a better mood to take on more feel-good projects, like organizing the bathroom.

Is such a thing really possible? I didn’t believe it until I was in Europe over the holidays. Maybe it’s because places like Denmark incinerate their trash, but the dispoables we bought there were super thin and were covered with a paper-like material, rather than plastic. (We took cloth diapers to use mostly, but kept ‘sposies around for nights and outings.)

A brand I discovered there was Nature Babycare. They make 100% chlorine-free, compostable diapers! I’ve been using them for a while now and love them. They seem to run a little small on my chubby-thighed 6-month-old, but other than that, I’m pretty happy with them. They also make awesome wipes and breast pads, also compostable.

Best of all is that diapers.com carries most of their line, and if you buy a case of four (120 diapers) and a few packs of wipes, you get free shipping. :-) I’ve calculated the price of Pampers Cruisers w/ free shipping at Amazon to $.30/diaper and these come out to $.37/diaper. Not bad for being a little greener.

I agreed to drive up to Salinas this weekend with my sister adn my nephew to visit my mother. She’ll be here in in an hour to pick me and Spice up.

I’m nervous about this for all sorts of reasons. First of all, my sister and I have been at each other’s throats for the past year, in a civil kind of way. We (violently) disagree on parenting, and why her son often displays such atrocious behavior like hitting and kicking. I also think she’s gotten terribly defensive and in general, we’re not quite good friends. In fact, if we weren’t blood, and that I have no other siblings and that neither of us talk to my father either, I’d have written her off long ago. I also worry about her son tossing a sippy cup or something at my baby’s head… no hard objects in the backseat.

In spite of all this, I agreed to a five-hour drive this weekend. The main reason is that while the spouse will be here, I’ll be away for the holidays and would like to see my mother before I go. I could drive up separately during the week, but I have a huge list of things to get done in the next month, from passports to pediatrician appointments and will need that time to get sorted. And maybe, just perhaps, being stuck in a car with my sister for 10 hours round-trip would help us come to an easier truce of some sort.

The spouse is highly doubtful of this, but has promised not to say “I told you so”. What a gem.

I got the spouse this Mylar balloon when he was in the hospital and it came home with us. I tend to throw out balloons when they deflate, but this one is still going!

The same thing happened with the spouse’s birthday balloon. Kinda makes it less special when they last forever.

I have an appointment with the shrink again today. *sigh* I’ve been vacillating between wanting to go and wanting to cancel. I know I should go because I know I need help and that’s what you’re supposed to do. I want to cancel because it doesn’t seem to help. I come home and everything just seems just as bleak as before.

It’s grey in L.A. today and hot cocoa stuffed with BonBonBar vanilla marshmallows is delish. Too bad I can’t figure out how to lick the inside of the mug…

The spouse is recovering nicely, thanks to lots and lots of vicodin. :-) My mother drove down for a surprise visit on last Monday, which was an unexpected godsend. She’s a nurse, so it was doubly good to have someone handy to keep an eye on the sleeping-all-day spouse as well as be able to hand the baby over once in a while. We lounged around for the most part, drinking tea and coffee and hanging out in the kitchen. The kitchen part is fun, because we both love cooking and it’s hard not to look at a jar of pecans and start imagining warm pecan pie. She woke up early one morning and cleared out and rearranged all my kitchen cupboards! Yea, Mom!

Now she’s spending the weekend with my sister, and the house is quiet. I’ve resurrected some old knitting/crochet projects and have filled up the recent downtime from Spice with laundry, the kitchen, crochet, tea and books. I whipped up some booties for her to wear under her baby legwarmers in some buttery soft , and frogged the newborn baby bolero I was making to make a sleep soaker instead. I also just finished Stardust last night and it was fantastic. (I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman since Preludes and Nocturnes, and aside from the Sandman books, my favorite book is still Neverwhere.) Now that I’ve read the book, I can add the DVD to my Netflix queue in good conscience.

My mother and sister are going for dim sum this morning and invited me. Given the recent drama, I’ll probably bow out, but dim sum! The spouse, being vegetarian, has a tough time finding something edible there, so I usually only go with my mother and sister. *sigh* I’ll just have to content myself with being curled up here with my tea, a blanket, cleaning out my rss feed reader and try desperately not to think of hot, steaming nor my gai.

I’ve been reading a book called Buddhism for Mothers. It’s like a cup of tea for my soul lately and is inspiring me to write the following…

I an tired. I would normally hate to admit this, but I’m trying to be compassionate with myself. The idea is that I would never treat anyone else as badly as I treat myself.

So, I am tired. My back aches, my knees hurt and I am mentally and emotionally drained. I feel guilty admitting this, as I’m sitting next to the recovering spouse, slumped sleeping in a chair because it’s too painful for him to move to the bed two feet away and there’s still ten minutes to go until his next dose of pain meds. Guilty, because I am a guilt-monger. Guilt is the whip that drives me onwards to some imagined perfection every day.

But where was I? Oh, right, I’m tired. I’ve barely caught a few hours of sleep since Thursday, and have been juggling baby, house and sick spouse since then. Maybe tired is an understatement, but I’m running on that extra adrenaline that comes with the fear of letting just one ball drop.

Oh, that’s what I was thinking. I was sitting here by the spouse, tearing up a little, and was wondering why I wanted to cry so badly. It’s just an appendectomy, right? Kids get them all the time. It was part exhaustion, I’m sure. But mostly, it was this overwhelming frustration at having to choose between the spouse and Spice. Three hours here. Four hours there. Both need me right now and I spend time with each guilty that I’m not spending time with the other. How messed up is that.

Of course, the logical side of me says that I can’t be two places at once, so there’s no point in crying over it. And the aiming-for-compassion part of me tries to pipe up that I really am trying to do the best I can, that I’ve done so much the past few days, and I just need to get a few hours of sleep. And that’s nothing to feel guilty about.

The spouse is in the hospital ER waiting for someone to cut out his appendix and I’m here at home.

We agreed that it would be better not to have Spice sitting around all night in a germy hospital, but being here alone while he’s there in pain is soooo hard. I just got off the phone with him and at least the pain is wearing off under the morphine.

I lay here in bed, next to a sleeping Spice, wondering who I could call to watch her overnight so I could go to the hospital. My sister and I are no longer talking. My mother lives 300 miles away. There’s a close family friend I trust, but she’s retired and about 30 miles away; I wouldn’t want to wake her up in the middle of the night to make her drive so far. And I can’t think of anyone else. All our other friends ate either too far away, ones we really aren’t “close” to, or not the baby-watching type.

As always, I wonder what people did in the past for this sort of thing, and I’m reminded that we only stopped living in villages a couple of hundred years ago. Never before have parents been expected to raise a child alone, just two adults. Children have been raised by villages, passed along to grandparents, aunts and uncles, even older children for babysitting. Even my mother was raised by her grandmother and aunt, alongside her parents, and in turn she raised her younger brothers and sisters as well as her cousins. This whole nuclear family thing was a bad, bad idea.

I should really try and sleep since Spice and I will be headed down there in a few hours. I just wanted to say that it really does take a village to raise a child. From PPD to ADHD, it’s becoming clear what happens when the village no longer exists.