You're my best friend, internet

Well, maybe not the internet per se in its vast, personless impersonality, but you all, gentle readers, are absolutely top notch.

Thank you thank you thank you to to the moon and back for all the comments you left on yesterday's only a little bit pathetic post. Truly made a mother's day. I think yesterday afternoon through tonight were the very finest hours we've spent nursing, Evie and I, because for the first time since she got here, I wasn't worrying about her size and how much she was consuming. It was nice. So thank you for that.

Thank you especially for the side-by-side comparisons of different sized kids from the same families and for kids who switched between breast and formula and didn't cause a blip on the 'ol growth chart. I really didn't want to stop nursing her, but I was starting to wonder if I was causing her to suffer or endangering her future development or compromising her chances of making a good match later in life or...well you get the picture.

Love letter, over and out.

Oh! But I just remembered, I have another reason to smooch the web, and it's because thanks to your savvy suggestions, I asked for and have indeed received promise of a shiny new FitBit. It will be here tomorrow. Much excitement. Many pounds displaced. So technology.

Finally, now that I can be sure it's going to stick, I'm on day 7 of another Whole 30. Remember how the last one ended up? Yeah, we named her Genevieve. (Note: I'm not insinuating that the Whole 30 program leads to pregnancy, only that I happened to discover we were pregnant on about day 11 of our last attempt, and thus crashed and burned in savory flames of Nutella and Italian sour cream and onion Pringles.)

But anyway, day 7. One week in. And it isn't terrible! I mean how can bacon wrapped dates ever be terrible? Okay, the no booze part is kind of terrible, but on the plus side (hopefully not the plus size) I'm so very clear headed and chipper in the mornings now. Do you know how much damage a single (ahem, healthy) glass of red wine in the evening does to a 31-year-old body upon waking the next morning? Lots, it turns out. But I digress.

My goal for this Whole 30 is simple: I want a healthier relationship with food. I want to lose the rest of my "baby weight," and I don't want to wake up every morning wishing to be knocked unconscious.  Also, I may have been tremendously inspired by Heather's transformative efforts in the health and wellness department. Also, I bought some million dollar vitamins from a friend last month and am hoping to boost their magical powers.

With that I'll bid you all a fond adieu and be off to the basement to my newly-relocated treadmill of delight. With this on my Kindle (it's less than $5 right now!), because Jen said so.

Crowd-sourcing a well baby check

Dearest mother bloggers,

I have this little baby girl. And by little, I mean absolutely petite beyond all imagining.

Don't let the food face fool you, she's teeny. Look at those nowhere-near-squeezed-by-the-Bumbo legs.

See? She's a wee little mite of a girl. And yeah yeah, though she be but little, she is fierce, there's just something off-putting to me, her mother, about how very wee she is.

My other two boys are not big kids by any means. I think they're in the 35-50% range for weight and height, and always have been. But Evie Doll, as she is usually called around these parts, is very much the likeness and scale of a living baby doll. Which is of course adorable, but when you're breastfeeding, is a little anxiety-producing as well.

Evie Doll, meet baby doll

Dave thinks I may be barking needlessly up the worry tree when we are, in fact, in a verdant alpine meadow above treeline, but I want a second opinion nevertheless. Of the internet variety. (Please note: her doctor who delivered her and has cared for her since birth has absolutely zero concerns and reassures me at every check up that she is growing perfectly on her own little curve.) And so I turn to you, gentle readership: have any of you had tiny babies? Were they exclusively breastfed? Did you try supplementing with formula to put weight on? Did they simply grow into healthy, petite toddlers and kids?

Here are Evie's stats:

• Born at 38 weeks 4 days (I'm a lucky girl - 6 lbs, 6 oz and 19 inches long - my smallest by more than 2 lbs and my shortest by 3 inches!
• Dropped to 5 13 after birth, regained birth weight by one week old
• 8 lbs, 11 oz at 2 month well baby
• 11 lbs even at 4 month well baby
• 13 lbs even at 6 month well baby
• 13 lbs 6 oz today, on the eve of her 7 month birthday
• 3% for weight and 5% for height on WHO chart, from birth until today; no change in percentile
• repeat ultrasounds during pregnancy because she was measuring small (that makes one of us) and for "short femurs" (I didn't even know that was a thing to worry about but, you betcha I got my google on hardcore that night after the tech let that little gem slip from her lips)

Is this normal? Am I crazy? Should I take her to reverse weight watchers and see if they can inject her with some of the fat she left behind in my torso region?

Some other factors which may contribute to her slimness are the presence of a 5 foot tall aunt, her godmother actually, on her paternal side, and the fact that Her Ladyship sleeps 11 hours a night (don't hate me, I earned this one) without a feed. She nurses 6-8 times per day with occasional table food offered as she shows interest. I know breast milk is denser calorically so I'm hesitant to load her up on too much crappy rice cereal, though I have been known to mix some with avocado oil and an avocado, much to her disgust and horror.

An anxious, first time  veteran mother thanks you kindly.

And so does this girl.

7QT: Unaccompanied minors, amazing customer service, and why my hideous redecoration of our little-used living room has me smiling so big

1. You know who's awesome lately? The customer service industry. Or rather, two particular companies (FitBit and Timi & Leslie) which have been completely and utterly surprising in their responsiveness and kindness to a poor customer in need of service.

Exhibit A:

My beautiful diaper bag, purchased in a fit of hormonal indulgence at 37 weeks with Evie. I get compliments on its beauty at least twice a week, and nobody ever suspects it's a diaper bag. But the material is pulling at this one teeny corner of the notleather and I was saddened and surprised. My last T&L bag lasted me 2 years, including one spent trotting back and forth to Italy, with no such signs of stress. I emailed the company, the asked for my receipt and a picture of the offending corner, and bada bing, a brand new bag is coming my way and I get to keep the "old" one. Sadly they have discontinued the color I loved and purchased it for, so it turns out my lucky little sister is probably the one getting a new diaper bag out of this situation, because none of these really struck my fancy. Shhhh.

2. I've also got an email in to the good peeps at FitBit, thanks to your lovely suggestions, and I'm feeling pretty optimistic about that whole situation, too. The week of retail redemption is at hand!

3. I'm getting so excited to meet all my Edel girls in just 2 short weeks! I'm also kind of in denial that I'm going to be getting a weekend "off," albeit with a baby in hand and a mic in the other, but hey, one can't accurately call any sort of trip a vacation once offspring have sprung, am I right?

4. I have gone ballistic decorating and rearranging my house ever since the Nesting Place burned up my Kindle a few weeks back, thanks to Jen's recommendation. Steph says it well when she identified it as a shot of decorating heroin to the vein, or something along those lines.

Anywho, I've got a happy new edition resting comfortably in our living room that goes absolutely not at all with anything decor related, and yet when I behold its ugliness I smile to myself and whisper inaudibly It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful. But what about the opposing corollary, it doesn't have to be beautiful to be perfect? Copyrighting it.

Definitely not feng shui. And yet, perfect...

5. So yeah, I finally pulled my itching trigger finger on a Craigslist treadmill at long last after walking into the feral kid's club at our gym Tuesday morning to retrieve my rat pack and had a few moments during which I could not locate the youngest member. Not in the stroller I'd wheeled in, not in the caretaker's arms...oh, there she is... sitting on the bottom level of the soft play structure IN THE ARMS OF A RANDOM 5-YEAR-OLD GIRL. Just to clarify, my 6 month old daughter, who cannot sit up, was being held by a strange child. The daycare worker happily fetched the baby along with her accompanying brothers while my normally confrontational self stared dumbly, accepted the compromised baby without a word. (Don't worry, I picked my jaw up off the floor and called the front desk after I got home. But still.) Needless to stay, Evie's kid's club days are over until she turns 4 or gains 20 lbs, whichever happens first.

6. I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' Perelandra for perhaps the seventh time, but definitely the first time in several years, and I had forgotten how utterly astonishing it is, how deeply spiritual and how moving, and how very good fiction is for the soul. I'm all about memoirs, DIY manifestos and self-helping manuals, but once it a while it's just so good to get lost in another world. (Thus far in my literary life, only C.S. Lewis and Michael O'Brien have the capacity to move me on a deep spiritual level, but I'm always open to suggestions.) Perelandra is the kind of book that will, quite unassumingly, cause you to set it down and momentarily lose yourself in contemplation of the nature of God. And it is most definitely not what one would traditionally call spiritual reading. It's beautiful, captivating and engaging prose of the first degree.

7. I have a problem with terrible music. The problem is, I like it. The corollary problem is that my 3-year-old son sometimes asks me to sing "every word to the airplane song for me, Mommy." and then I can't. Because adult themes and language. At least he's not into Ke$ha. Yet.

See you at Jen's place?

Walk-a-thon: Crushed it

That is, my husband crushed it, dark horse that he is. He knocked me out of the top spot by about 11,000 steps, which is basically an entire day's worth of walking.

How he did it is another matter entirely.

It turns out my sneaky co-competitior was in the habit of, ahem, checking up on me and my step totals for the day, gleaned from a quick glance at my phone on his way out the door to the gym after bedtimes and dishes and the like.  He wasn't technically cheating since lots of days I'd text him my count to mock/motivate him whilst he sat, desk bound, almost powerless to answer my numbers, but it sure was nice for him to have a goal to shoot for and then exceed every day.

So he beat me. But you know what? He felt kind of bad for being kind of unethical in his techniques...so he suggested we split the prize. $50 bucks instead of a hundred? Sounds okay to me. Because the hot pink FitBit Zip was also around $50...and I'd been eyeing it up since about week two when the glamor of sweating all over my iPhone had worn off and I was pretty sure I'd be contracting breast/hip/ovarian cancer in no time from the various places I like to stash the thing.

So thanks to a magnanimous spouse and Amazon prime, this little cutie was in my paws in 2 short days. And then, for another glorious 2 short days, it was mine...and how wonderful those days were! The first day I wore it I got 14,000 steps easily, so motivated was I. The second day was in the 11K range, but still respectable. And then on the third day, well...on the third day, we went to the "beach" at a nearby reservoir and I took it off my waistband and stowed it in the stroller pocket for safekeeping. And then we played, and then we de-sanded, and then we marched back to the car and loaded everything/one up, and then...

well...

Something else got crushed:

Womp, womp.

Not the best way to blow $50.

Now I'm debating replacing it or just leveling up a couple more fifties for a sweet Craigslist treadmill. I love the gym near our house and the price can't be beat...but I don't love putting dainty princess Genevieve in the sometimes Lord of the Flies-esque kids's club. I literally spend my entire workout having mini panic attacks about someone knocking her out of her stroller or an exersaucer ...(crazycrazywho'dbelieveI'mnotafirsttimemom?) so, I think I'd get a better workout in our basement with minions circling me like attention-seeking pirañas. Yes? No?

And I haven't really lost any more weight since committing to the daily 10K steps, but committed I am, and I think I'm going to see long term results over the coming months because walking 5.5 miles per day is a lot, and I'm a lot more motivated to complete a 'work out' that requires neither immense exertion or specific 60 minute chunks of time. It just works, for now. Plus, my legs look great.

How about you walkers out there? And all you runners who emailed/commented with the secret of the century, which is that walking = weight loss while running only = running. Mind blown. How long have you kept up your routine? And how long before you saw results in the mirror?

New Baby, New Mom

(Not a pregnancy announcement. I don't know why I feel such a need to issue that disclaimer, aside from the small voice in my head screaming "stop traumatizing people who are considering NFP." Which, by the way, works, and by that I mean it makes you aware of your fertility as a couple, causes you to have serious conversations with your spouse regularly, along the lines of are we ready for another baby? Have you slept in the last 3 weeks and can I gingerly stroke your arm? And my personal favorite Are you sure you should have that third margarita, darling, since we're seeking to avoid?) all while in no way minimizing the enormous responsibility and gift of being co-creative with the Creator. End disclaimer.)

Whew. Exhaustive PSA aside, as I was sipping a piping hot espresso shoving scrambled eggs into my 6-month-old's mouth this morning whilst she perched on my lap at breakfast, I got to thinking. I thought to myself, self, you don't really mother this third born the way you mothered your first.

And thank God for that, amiright?

I have thee most vivid memory of leaping across my parent's kitchen table and slapping a spoonful of Death by Chocolate trifle out of my mother's hand as she hovered dangerously near Sir Joseph's tiny, 9-month-old lips. MOTHER! I screamed, WHAT IF HE HAS A TREE NUT ALLERGY?! THERE ARE WALNUTS IN THAT!!!!!

And not to minimize the real and horrifying dangers of life-threatening allergies in the slightest, neither my family nor Dave's has any history of food allergies, the likeliness that my baby was going to swell up and immediately stop breathing were relatively slim. Still, I quite literally slapped my mother's hand away as if she were spooning rat poison into his mouth, leaving her a little stunned but primarily amused (I presume, mother) because she, the mother of 7 healthy children, had no apparent business trying to sneak her grandson a bite of chocolate deliciousness.

Fast forward nearly 4 years and I'm the one exposing my precious to highly-allergic table foods well before the 12 month safety threshold, because I think I read somewhere that the sooner the better in terms of preventing some food allergies, and also because I'm sitting at the breakfast table in my pajamas, coffee in one hand and laptop opened nearby and I'm giving instructions to the 3 year old about proper table etiquette and somebody pooped and the baby would like some food and okay, here you go, open wide sweetheart!

I was chatting with a friend yesterday about how differently we mother our third born children, and how much we wish we could go back and tell our freshly-minted momselves: it's going to be okay. This is going to get so much easier. and most especially: you're going to be a totally different mom in just a few short years. 

We each of us have in our possession a third baby who sleeps and eats like a dream. Never fussy for no reason, never protesting naps or bedtimes, happy just to be included in the day-to-day of busy family life.

I wondered aloud whether we'd both been blessed with supernaturally calm children for our third go-round, as kind of a cosmic consolation for our, ahem, spirited first-borns and HIIIIIIGH needs second borns, and then I wondered if maybe it was we who had calmed down.

I've been doing this professionally for close to 5 years now, counting pregnancy, and while I'm by no means an expert in my field, I have learned a thing or two about what constitutes grounds for freaking the freak out and what is simply another speed bump on the long and winding road of parenthood. So while my kids are regularly presenting me with new and challenging scenarios, especially the highly mobile pair, I'm a little less prone to panicky google sessions and frantic phone calls to my husband about a weird rash, a strangely pitched cry or an afternoon of nap-strking organized by the local (and highly entitled) toddler union.

These days I'm more likely to shrug my metaphorical shoulders, load 'erybody up in the mini and drive aimlessly to a neutral location to attempt to reset everybody's moods and salvage the remains of the day. Super Target anyone? Or just a new-to-us park where the novelty might defuse the rivalry running rampant in my ranks that afternoon.

So new moms? Take heart. You're going to get better at this. And things that struck you as horrifying and overwhelming and devastating? They'll still be there. And while there will always be x-factors of an unknown varietal, particularly with your oldest guinea pig, you will so get a handle on this baby thing. If anything you'll become stupidly confident in your ability to make more babies, and thereby find yourself perpetually behind the procreative eight ball and honestly, the stuff of life and living will wear you down and wear you out and make you more yourself, purified by the experiences and the hardships and the heartaches and yes, the good stuff too.

And one day you'll find yourself absentmindedly rubbing anti-aging moisturizing cream onto somebody's diaper rash and the only thing that will stop and give you pause will be the price tag of what you're slathering on the baby bottom at hand, and not whether it's organic or hypoallergenic or tested for use on infants under the age of 2. And then you'll shrug and keep rubbing it in, mentally high-fiving yourself for remembering to put anything at all on that poor little butt.

Babies don't really get any easier the more you have. It's you who grows in confidence, experience, and, frankly, indifference to what you formerly perceived as ALL THE THINGS that mattered so very much when offspring were just a hazy concept and your expanding waistline was all you had to show for your parenting experience.

So, to all my inquisitive fellow grocery getters, imma let you in on a little secret: Yes, I do in fact have my hands full. But let me assure you, when there was only one in the cart, he was perched in an organic bamboo-cotton card cover pulled from the massive depths of my plastic-coated diaper bag, retrieved and installed only after a healthy slathering of anti-bacterial hand sanitizer had been applied to every square inch of cart surface. I also had a baby carrier stuffed in there, lest he become dissatisfied and prefer to ride upon my bosom for the duration of our stressful foray into the store.

My hands were just as full when my car held only one car seat. It's my heart and my brain that have enlarged now, and there's more room for error, more room for fun, and more room for patience to manage the additional children you see.