Incubation Nation

“I love Justin Bieber, Mama”, Lucy proclaimed to me in the car this morning. “I know, baby”, I replied. “No!! MY BIEBER!!”, Liv yelled from the back. I just grinned, those funny girls.

Lucy, at the ripe old age of 4 has the Bieber Fever. She saw him on the Kid’s Choice Awards and has been hooked. 4-years old with her first boy obsession. Oy,

We were listening to the radio on the way to my mom’s this morning and the local radio station was all about Justin because he is in town today performing a free concert for the school in our area who collected the most pennies for our Children’s Hospital. Girls were calling in because he was (supposedly) listening to their messages from his hotel. And they were all “I love you, Justin!!” “I’m single, Justin!!” and various other teeny bopper bull shit.

It took me back though—some 20 years when I myself was in middle school. Our school raised the most money and had the most Walk America participation. And so we had our own private concert in our gym with……wait for it…..

NELSON!!

I know. 1. I am old, and 2. OMG, NELSON!! But remembering it, I know just how those girls feel. I wasn’t even so much obsessed with Nelson at the time, but to have a big time celebrity in our school was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to me at that point in my life. And I remember how I felt (ok still feel) about, say NKOTB, and I totlally get those little girls.

And even though she’s only 4, I’m happy to indulge Lucy’s obsession. We pump up the music in the car. We recorded SNL for her last week. We’ve discussed (but haven’t made a decision about) going to see him at the state fair in August.

I can’t wait to see what she’s like as a teenager.

• The first 2 weeks are always the hardest. You will want to die. You will want to cry. But think of the energy you will have going in to week 3. You’ve done this before. You got this.
• Don’t compare yourself to all those skinny girls. They probably didn’t have 3 babies in less than 5 years, and if they did, they are the freaks. You are the norm. Nobody there is concerned with your jiggly ass. (I promise)
• You have always had a love/hate relationship with the elliptical. You will want to kick it’s ass for the first week or so. But once you hit your groove, it will be your best friend.
• Drinking 20 ounces of water before you’ve even had breakfast will seem like a bad idea and you will try and talk yourself out of it. Don’t. Accept the peeing all day in exchange for not dying from the muscle spasms.
• Getting up at 4:50 am sucks. So what, suck it up. You haven’t slept a full night in more than 2 years anyway.
• Regardless of the outcome, you will never wear a bikini. Ever. Focus on being healthy for your children and your husband.

I feel like the awkward girl in those teeny-bopper movies, who lands the hot guy, but it’s all a big secret. I got a really big promotion yesterday–I mean HUGE–but I’m not allowed to talk about it until a formal announcement is made. And I am just DYING to talk about it.

I want to first say 2 things—thank you all so much for cheering me on through Twitter as I was applying and going through my interviews. My anxiety was through the roof and knowing you guys were out there helped a lot.

The second is that although I have been less than thrilled with my current job and what it has become over the last 12 months, I am grateful to have had it and for what I have learned.

So the new job– it’s a consulting and process ownership position. I am responsible for the processes and the “making it work” piece for an entire line of business. It is a really big deal. I no longer have direct reports, nor do I report to anyone on site. My boss is actually located in Texas (hence my title). There is travel, extra vacation, a laptop and a pretty decent bump in pay involved. This is where I have been looking to go for my whole career. This is why I haven’t minded being called a braniac or a nerd all these years. I have this uncanny ability to retain job information (why this never worked for me in school, I don’t know) and recall it and apply it to all sorts of situations. Only in my work life am I able to talk completely out of my ass until something makes sense. And it has finally paid off for me.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I am terrified. Insanely so. It’s the good kind of scary though, you know what I mean? Like there is so much out there before me, and did it–I’ve made it to the top on my own merit.

I can’t help feeling like a superstar.

The beginning of March always leaves me feeling a bit like a panting dog; thirsty for water on a hot summer’s day. Spring is so close that I can taste it, and yet, here in Western New York there is still much snow on the ground and there is not a tulip busting through fresh spring soil in sight.

But, it is kind of warming up. In fact this weekend we will boast highs of 40 degrees. Surely some snow will melt and the muddy smells of spring will seep up through the grass. I can’t wait.

I’ll be spending the weekend with my mother and my aunts in Rochester, sans kids. I’m not exactly sure what we will be doing aside from going for Thai food on Saturday night, but I’m sure it will be fun. Hopefully my cousins will be able to join us for some of it. In my mother’s words, we’ll just be chilling. (Chilling. With my mother. OMG)

We are leaving right after I get out of work on Friday, so I have to have everything packed and ready tonight. It’s kind of an overwhelming thought. I’ll need to get all of the kid’s crap ready for Hub too. I may as well not even go to sleep.

And speaking of sleep (along with new beginnings), the baby is still sleeping. All night every night. It is glorious–so much so that you almost forget not sleeping for the better part of 2 years. And when you have a sleeping baby it makes it more feasible to talk about possibly having the fourth and final baby. Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody is saying yes right now, but nobody is screaming ‘HELL NO!!’ anymore either.

Time will tell, I suppose. Maybe next spring.

It’s the sort of thing that I am afraid to say out loud, fearing that I will jinx the progress we’ve made somehow. It’s the baby. She’s been sleeping through the night…four nights in a row now. I know, 4 nights out of 18 long months of not sleeping is not exactly progress. I know. But God, she is finally sleeping. And it’s nice. Every morning I wake up surprised because she hasn’t been up screaming at some random hour. I’ve heard her whine a bit a few times, usually to throw out the blanket I rudely cover her with, since she sleeps with her blankie crumpled beneath her, but she is not up and screaming for me to “meer!!”

You want to hear how this came about? It’s simple really….I just stopped going to her. I know, right?? Hub started going in, and telling her firmly that it was sleeping time. He did not pick her up, made her stay in her crib, and talked to her. And when she asked for me, he told her that I was sleeping, which seemed to bewilder her, like “Mommy sleeps?? What??” But she took it from him and laid back down and went to sleep several times over. There was one night when I went in and tried to do the same, and all hell broke loose, but when Hub came in she settled right down.

So yeah, 4 days. I’m sure now she’ll get some horrible virus that throws this all off, but I’m taking these 4 days and running.

Not that I’m sleeping anyway. It’s The Olympics; they always do this to me. I don’t even care about them, but I end up getting sucked in, and watching, and staying up way later than I should on a work night. The big kids stayed up with us last night to watch the women’s skiing, and the speed skating relay (I was just watching Apollo’s beard…I mean WTF…and why does the camera only focus on him?), and while I crept out of the house at 7:20 this morning, having been up for more than an hour already, they were still warm and snuggled in their beds. Jerks.

Bud had a TKD test last night (first stripe of his blue belt) and we brought Liv, and she was a terror. There was another baby there, just a few days older than Liv, and that baby did not stuff handfuls of Goldfish down her mother’s shirt, did not scratch her mother’s face or try to pry her mouth open to get her gum. That baby did not scream at the injustice of being corralled to one small area. That mother did not miss her son getting his award because she was removing her baby to the lobby where she could be entertained by finger painting in the steam that had accumulated on the exterior doors. That mother surely does not have sore arms from holding her baby tight to stop her from flinging herself on to the floor.

But she is sleeping, so I won’t complain.

I can pinpoint the exact moment in time when I became a chicken, and it was not, as some might expect, the moment I pushed out my first baby (although having children has inexplicably altered my ability to ride anything that spins). No, I became a chicken on mild day in March 2003, when Hub, my brother and I all went snow tubing. It was a rather warm day, close to 40 degrees, and we’d talked about going for some time. This would probably be our last chance of the season, so off we went.

The warm air had made the slopes a bit slushy, but it was still fun. Not too fast; I would say just right. As the sun went down though, the temperature dropped and that top layer of slush turned to ice. I was starting to get cold anyway, so I decided to take one more trip down and then I was going to go to the lodge for some french fries and cocoa until the guys were ready to go.

I could feel the difference in the snow as the lift pulled my tube to the top of the hill. Definitely slicker. I could see the tubers going down the hills to my right, screaming their heads off. At the top I was warned to go down on my belly so I could control the tube with my feet—a warning which I ignored. I started down the hill on my bum and could feel the difference in speed. I bounced higher off the bumps. It was exhilarating and so fun…and then I flipped. I flipped completely over and landed with my head stuck in the snow, ostrich style. It hurt like a mother, but I had to get up and get back down the hill because other people were coming. I was scarred for life.

We’ve been sledding a few times since then, but the kids have been small and content to go down baby hills with Hub. Hub has also built hills on our front lawn for the kiddos in the past and that has worked out just fine. When he called on Saturday and suggested sledding at a local park, I was ok with it—I would at least have the baby to hide behind. Plus the zipper on my down coat had broken, so all I had was my wool coat. So sure we could go. He would deal with the big kids and I would handle the baby.

Until of course, Bud asked me to go down with him. And how do you say no to your pleading first born? So I said yes, and down we went in the new tube we bought him for his 6th birthday. I was petrified and probably would have peed my pants if I’d had time to think about how scared I really was. It seemed like an eternity until the sled stopped moving and the adrenaline and sheer terror pumping through my veins was probably the only thing that got me back up the hill, instead of laying at the bottom and crying. I hated every second of it and Bud found that to be very amusing.

The kids did end up having a blast though, going down with Hub and each other. Lucy was too scared to go by herself, but Bud went down a good 10 times solo. He’d have gone 50 more if we’d have let him. Liv was content to be pulled around in her sled and conned all of us in to taking a turn. We stayed longer than we planned, until dusk had settled in. My terror aside, it really was a good day.

One of my friends, pregnant with her third and final child, posted to facebook last night that she found out that she was having a boy—her third boy. She had something like 30 comments, and I went in to add my congratulations. I was infuriated to find people actually offering their condolences to the fact that it was not a girl. People actually saying “I am so so sorry you will never have a little girl…”, or “you poor woman in a house full of boys..” I mean, seriously people. So I went in and offered my sincere congratulations and excitement and got the hell out of there.

Now I don’t know if she is harboring any resentment, but I started thinking about the assholish things that have been said to me during my pregnancies. I’ve heard it all from “the perfect family” after Lucy to “give your body a rest already”(from my own mother), and have even heard that I am contributing to over-population. I get stares and looks of sympathy when I am out with all of my kids, and on the occasions where I also have my 2.5-year-old niece, I actually get comments of “I am soooo sorry”. I always hear “Wow, you must have your hands full.”. I do. But I deal with it. And I chose this handful.

When I get in moods like this, I start getting spun up about every injustice that was ever thrown my way. Like the bitch in the restaurant bathroom last summer who actually said out loud how nice it was for me to use soap as I washed Lucy’s hands. This was sarcasm of course, since I didn’t use soap; that commercial stuff tears her hands to shreds. I have a gentle moisturizing hand sanitizer in my purse for such occasions. I didn’t say anything to her then…but I wish I would have, because seriously—what an asshole, but I’ve spent many a night coming up with what I should have said. (The jerk store called, and they’re running out of YOU!!)

In an attempt to redirect though, I started thinking if there was any time that I may have been insensitive without realizing it, like those poor misdirected shlubs who left comments for my friend. I remember a time when a friend brought her new baby in to work; he was a few weeks old. I gushed how cute he was and squealed that he was just! so! tiny! To which she snapped “he’s a baby, he’s supposed to be tiny. At the time I was taken aback, because clearly I meant nothing. I found out later that her son had some growth issues and she was sensitive about it. Duly noted. I didn’t mean anything by it, but to her, it meant EVERYTHING.

But…

Here’s something I’ve caught myself saying a few times while visiting friends in the hospital, with their tiny 6 or 7 pounders: “She’s just so cute! My kids were only this tiny on the inside! I wouldn’t know what to do with such a tiny baby!” I don’t mean anything by it, but if we changed it around, if someone had said to me about 10lb 2oz Newborn Bud “Wow, he is huge! My kids were his size when they were 4-months old hardy har har..” I would probably have been infuriated. (not that we didn’t get comments about his size, but whatever)

So I guess the question is, who’s the asshole now. Clearly, it is me. It’s probably been all of us at some point or another. Do we all just need to shut the hell up about the age, size and gender babies of others? We just might.

I think I’ll be going with the standard “He is just darling.” from here on out. It’s safer that way.

I slept well on Saturday night, dressed warmly in thermals and a fleece. The baby didn’t wake up, and neither did I. I fluttered in and out of consciousness around 8am as the kids started waking and making noise. They were laughing, entertaining each other and entertaining the baby who was still in her crib. I thought to myself how nice it was to not have to be out of bed the very second my children were awake, and shut my eyes again, my head buried in my pillow.

After a few minutes Hub got up and was dressing at the end of the bed. I could hear the girls starting to bicker, so I stretched and opened my eyes. As I started to sit up, I caught something yellow from the corner of my eye and before I knew it, there was my son, his Halloween mask on, screaming “BOO!!” right in to my face. I screamed and sat up straight in terror, not quite certain what was going on; not sure whether to laugh or cry. He’s lucky that I didn’t push him over. He was pleased to have gotten me. I…well, I was recovering.

This is six.

Six is a weird age. He’s like a full fledged kid, unlike Lucy who is 4 and still clings to a bit of the baby-ness. He’s a kid, who gets on the bus in the morning, and goes to Tae Kwon Do in the afternoon. He has homework at least 3 nights a week. He can read more than just 3 and 4 letter words, he can get himself a snack, and he can call me every morning when I’m on my way to work, just to say ‘have a good day’.

He’s a bundle of gangly arms and legs, extra long toes, always dirty fingernails and a mix of permanent and baby teeth. Some days, he tells me that he loves me more than anyone ‘in this whole house’, and other days he tells me that he doesn’t like me much at all.

He’s my only boy and the most loving of all my kids. When sitting with me, he subconsciously twirls my hair in his fingers, just like he did as a nursing baby.

Six is a constant reminder that he is growing up. I can accept it; but I don’t always like it.

When I got out of the shower this morning and walked through the living room, I thought that the blanket on the couch looked a bit more rumpled than I’d left it. Sure enough, out popped his boo-screaming head.

Six got me again.

• The baby is 18-months old today. 1.5!! Holy cow where does the time go? Soon I will be referring to her as my almost two-year-old. Oh no…that is just not possible. She reminds us every day that she is big. BIG. And that she has opinions and stuff. About everything. But mostly about having an endless supply of crackers; CRACKERS!!. And yogurt; GOGOAT!!. And how clearly she is big enough to eat a taco right at the table. I call her on my lunch break and when she comes to the phone I say “Hi baby!” and she mimics me back, my high-pitched mommy voice to a T “Hi baby!”. She is something else; like no child I’ve ever known. And I am sure glad she’s here (even though she STILL does not sleep through the night).

• On a recent trip to Cracker Barrel for breakfast, Hub and I were given 3 mini bottles of real maple syrup with our pancakes. They were glass bottles, similar to mini liquor bottles. We were a bit intrigued as they were sealed, and were clearly one serving type items. We got to talking with our server who mentioned that the bottles were just thrown out after the meal, unless the patrons took them home. We were kind of outraged. You have to imagine that they sell a lot of pancakes there and if you get 2 bottles with each set of pancakes…well that is a lot of glass to be throwing out. Wouldn’t it be pretty easy to recycle those? I’m thinking of making this a crusade.
• Hmph, I really thought I would have more random things to share, but I guess I don’t. So with that said, have a great weekend!!