Wishing you a yummy holiday

Happy holidays everyone. May all of your wishes come true. May you have a winter filled with many snow angels...

Blah, blah, blah. OK. I just want everyone to get pregnant, stay pregnant, have a healthy baby(ies), sign the official paperwork. Whatever. Whatever it takes to get you where you want to go in this world of motherhood.

I'm feeling a little weird this holiday. Grateful for such a full life. A little embarassed for wanting more. Trying to play it cool on the outside while inwardly desperate for another child in our family.

We leave soon for our annual ski trip. To Utah this time. I'll try to find something funny most days to post from the road. Stay tuned for stories of one horse towns, laundramats and toddler antics as we snake our way through Eastern Oregon, Southern Idaho and Northern Utah.

Above is our holiday card photo of Missy at 1-1/2. Like the good Northwest girl that she is, she loves apples.

Peace, love & powder, Ms. Planner, Cowboy & Missy

My Work Here is Done

Kind of.

During the past 2-1/2 years of keeping a blog, I amassed a small list of other women in the throes of infertility whose blogs I followed. Today is a happy, happy day. Because – with only 2 exceptions – and I don’t know what is going on with those two writers because they haven’t posted in many months (Carrie? Where are you? I miss you.) – every one of the bloggers I follow regularly has made it through to the other side.

Last fall I wondered if I should end my blog as a way of closing the door on infertility for me. I decided, however, that I could not leave all my comrades who hadn’t closed the door themselves.

All are now mothers. Many are on a successful second journey. It makes me exhale a deep sigh of relief. Of contentment.

But a few are still struggling for a second shot at pregnancy. Myself included. So I’m not giving this space up.

Cowboy and I decided that while we are late in the game, we want to give it another shot. My cycles are finally back now that I am nursing only once a day.

So I fired up the CBEFM and set it to CD1.

Holy shit. Here we go again.

$5

There are many, many things I love about living in the West. One of my favorites is that you can buy a Christmas tree permit from the USDA for $5 and cut down your very own tree from one of the nearby national forests.

We head up around Mt Hood for ours every year during the Thanksgiving holiday. This year was especially poignant as it was our pup's first tree hunt and - at 15 years old - most likely our golden retriever's last.

Sweet Jesus! She Sleeps!

"Some women's husbands buy them plastic surgery enhancements," I joked to Missy's Ear, Nose & Throat pediatrician post-op, "Instead, mine gets my daughter's adenoids removed so I get the gift of sleep."

So that's what it was. In the weeks following surgery to remove her ginormous adenoids, waking during the night has become the exception not the rule for sweet little Missy. She regularly goes 11 to 12 hours. Miracle upon miracles.

I won't gloat, because I hated people who gloated that their kid slept through the night when mine was waking every three hours. But, I mean, c'mon. I might be a little bit due. She didn't sleep for more than four hours at a clip for 18 looooong months. Until now.

Sigh. So blissful. Sleep. All six, seven, even eight (!) hours of it. I can remember phone numbers again. I can walk into a room and remember what I came in there for. I can put her to bed and - shocker! - actually go do something without her waking in an hour or two.

To quote the t-shirt: Life is good.

I honestly have to credit my nanny and the book, "The No Cry Sleep Solution," for my good fortune. The book got me seriously thinking that Missy might have sleep apnea. And my nanny galvanized me to act on it.

As for our regular pediatrician... She can suck it. When I brought up the no-sleeping-through-the-night-yet issue at Missy's one year appointment, all I got was 10 pages of cry-it-out and the Ferber Method protocol. As it happens, she could have asked me three basic questions: does she snore? what does it sound like on the monitor just before she wakes up? have you or your husband had your tonsils and/or adenoids removed? And referred me to an ear, nose and throat pediatrician for further review. Sleep apnea in children - and especially in babies - is vastly underdiagnosed. I now know why.

The best part though is Missy when she wakes up. She is all rosy cheeked and bright eyed. Like a baby should look when they wake after a long night's rest. Gone are the dark circles and pale visage.

Yes. Life is good.

This is Bullshit

This whole H1N1 vaccine thing is bullshit.

In the state where I live, it is illegal to give a shot that contains the preservative thimerasol (mercury) to a child under the age of 3. Except for within the next 6 months. Our secretary of health lifted the mercury ban in response to getting more H1N1 vaccines to the population.

I get it. The single-dose preservative-free shots are more expensive, take longer to manufacture and are - by virtue of being single doses - less economical. The drug companies can respond faster with the larger dose vials that get more vaccines to more people. This is a good thing.

However, the momma in me - and specifically the hippie momma in me who is already skeptical of THE MAN and so many of his vaccines that we now give our kids (chickenpox, Hepatitis B to infants, you don't want to get me started) - is like, why the fuck would I give my baby something that is illegal to give her in any other circumstance?

Don't get me wrong. We vaccinate. Mostly. We are on a slower schedule. Missy did get her regular influenza vaccine this year. And I totally would give her the H1N1 vaccine except I cannot find a thimerasol-free version. Apparently I don't have the hook up.

Our friend's pediatrician in the next town has a few precious vials of the perservative-free vaccine but she is doling them out to her patients who also happen to be invited to her young son's birthday party next week. Alas, we are not on the guest list.

So what we've been doing instead is being social pariahs. We go to the park a couple of times each day for fresh air and a change of scenery but I chase Missy around with CleanWell hand sanitizer like a complete germ-a-phobe. Otherwise, no children's museums, no shopping, no zoo, no library.

Of course we are taking Missy into the lion's den tomorrow for her surgery. The staff have assured me they are on heightened alert for the flu and have very strict procedures. Still, I worry.

So I guess what I'm admitting - and I apologize and beg your pardon and all that - but until I can find someone who will give us the mercury-free version, I will be one of those people who relies on other kids getting their vaccinations to keep mine safe.

I really don't like playing it that way. But I like injecting my daughter with mercury less.

Sleep is for the Weak

Or for those with normal-sized adenoids.

We have endured nearly three months where we have not co-slept. Two months of no more night nursing. One month of no more early-morning momma "snacks" with the hope that doing so at 4:30 a.m. might give me a few more precious hours of sleep.

I use the word endured because that is what we have been doing.

"Sleep training, my ass," I think as I stumble down the hall for the third, maybe fourth time that night. Out of sheer desperation after one particularly brutal night, I looked up a local pediatric clinic specializing in sleep disorders. I suspected...well, I mean, you start grasping at straws when you haven't cobbled together more than 4 hours of sleep at a time for a year-and-a-half.

Then our new nanny commented to me that Missy stops breathing occasionally when she goes down for a nap. I had noticed this, too, but it took an objective perspective to make me realize that it wasn't just me looking for something else to blame other than myself for completely fucking up my kid's sleep. Something that could cause my daughter to still wake so much in the night and look in the morning like she hadn't slept a wink, even after 12 hours in the crib.

"Oh, yes," said the doctor, "Just as I thought." A tiny camera is up my daughter's numbed nose. She is handling it - like she handles everything - like a champ. Her chin out, jaws clamped, narrowed eyes but no crying.

The nasal passage 98% blocked by an oversized adenoid.

Her brain isn't going into deep sleep because it may need to react quickly to not enough air. When she gasps for air, her body moves as an involuntary response and she wakes. Missy, it turns out, has been subsisting on light REM sleep for who knows how long.

It's not a huge issue now (except for if you are the mommy who gets up to comfort her each time she wakes) but school-aged kids that have undiagnosed sleep apnea have trouble focusing, get frustrated easily and are often improperly diagnosed with ADHD because they are wired from being chronically overtired.

With that in mind, day surgery to have the offending body part removed will be scheduled shortly.

"I can't guarantee she will sleep through the night," said the pediatrician, "But I can guarantee that she will get better quality sleep when she does sleep."

Yes Ma'am

I can't sleep again. I think my body just got used to Missy's every-other-hour-night-wakings stint (I kid you not. It sucked. Sigh.) and now my body is like, "Uh-uh, sister. We are so not going to sleep only to have that g-damn baby monitor wake us up in 45 minutes."

So, we don't have T.V. but we still watch T.V. Thanks to Net*flix, I get to revisit all sorts of gems I never could stay up for in a previous life. Now I have a major crush on Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights.

I know. Major hotness.

I think it is the Texas girl still in me. I mean, I now live in a place where I hardly wear make-up or jewerly and my ever-present Patagucci fleece vest actually looks cool instead of frumpy - like it would in Texas. I love where I live but I sometimes get nostalgic for big skies, serious football and men and boys who say, "yes, ma'am" and "no sir." So hot.

Save for Cowboy, no one calls me "ma'am" here. And I am at the point in my life where I kind of want them to. Maybe that is yet another reason I married him.

Harvest Season

I am exhausted. I should be sleeping. But I can’t. Every time I get close to falling asleep, I hear a "thwock" coming from my kitchen denoting that another jar of delicious, organic applesauce from Eastern Washington has sealed itself. And I get all proud and giddy.

So far we’ve put up:
- 15 quarts of peaches (see above)
- 16 quarts of pears
- 10 quarts of apple sauce...with more to come
- 15 pints of roasted tomato sauce, which is no small feat when you consider that it takes 10 lbs of tomatoes roasting for 6 hours to make 3 pints of sauce.

It is my first foray into canning. I am quite hooked.

This year, our family Earth Day goal was to join a CSA. At a local meet-the-farmers night, I got hooked into a locavore food network run by a young farmer wife who networks with other farms to bring local products to market. It is major off-the-grid grocery shopping. In addition to our weekly veggies & berries, now we now eat local cheese, yogurt, honey, grass-fed beef, pastured chickens & their eggs, pastured pork and have access to the yummiest organic pears, peaches, apples and nectarines for a fraction of what we would pay in the store.

It takes a bit of extra effort sourcing all this stuff and organizing it into meals but it is worth it when I watch Missy devour half a peach that we canned and then sign "more please."

Indian Summer Sweet

I am incredulous at how fast they go from baby to child. The only thing baby about her is that she has yet to sleep through the night. I totally jinxed myself when I publicly asked the Universe (on this blog) for a baby that slept through the night sooner rather than later.

Trifecta

Exactly a month has passed since my last post. These 30 days feel like an eternity to me. So hectic are the days that I drop into bed each night, grateful for a few moments of stillness.

The beginning of August brought Missy’s accelerated weaning and transition from our bed to her own crib. Both shook her – and me – up a bit but we managed.

Right when we got our footing with only one nursing session at bedtime and a few nights of only waking once (pure heaven), we welcomed a new puppy into our home. Yeah, I am crazy. A toddler and a puppy. Some hours, it is great. (My favorite hour is when pup and babe nap simultaneously). Some hours, it sucks. The timing for Miss Black Butte Swift – a.k.a. "Boo" – is not ideal but she came into our lives and is here to stay. So I’m dealing with it.

She wants – oh she so very wants – to be a good dog. You can see it in her. But right now she is just all, well, puppy. And needs to learn the ways of our house and what we expect from our dogs. After the rocky first days, she is settling in a bit. Of course, right when she started to form a routine and stopped stealing the baby’s toys at every turn, we received a visit from THE VIRUS.

Frick. Missy caught a viral infection that has bestowed us with constant yellow ribbons of snot, pink eye, irritated ears, fit-full sleep and general crabbiness. It’s been around for more than 2 weeks and she is finally on a mild course of antibiotics to abate it.

I cannot help but wonder if the onset of the virus is a direct correlation to our diminished nursing sessions. And from the two-steps-forward-two-steps-back camp, I increased nursing sessions to combat her dehydration and to provide some extra comfort and, hopefully, more antibodies. I mean, the night before the snot started flowing, the kid was pulling down my t-shirt and trying to crawl in while crying. I think she was trying to tell me she needed some nursing to level things out a bit. But I will certainly be known to our dinner guests that night as the-woman-who-was-still-breastfeeding-when-her-kid-could-pull-down-her-shirt-how-gross. Sigh.

Now that she is on the mend, I am slowly backing her nursing sessions down. But you can bet that she is not pleased. Not pleased at all. I feel like we are back at square one.

So I try to see each day as a blessing. How lucky to have such a full life. Sometimes though I just take it hour by hour and try to get through each day without yelling at my husband, grabbing the pup too hard by the scruff of her neck when she does something ultra-bad or being exasperated with my daughter. My daily incantation: this too shall pass. I try to go easy on myself in terms of what I accomplish each day. But going easy of myself was never my strong suit.

Big Girl Time

The few months since Missy turned 1 (from May until now) have rocked my world. Not in a bad way though.

Missy has rocketed from a baby to a little girl seemingly overnight. First she started to understand what I was saying. Then she started walking. One day, you wake up and jokingly tell her to go get her shoes so you can go to the park. And she does!

I am a bit wistful. The baby time is nearly gone.

Also this week we are transitioning from co-sleeping to crib sleeping at night. AND dropping the night feeding(s). That is a lot for one little girl to handle. Apparently so for her momma, too.

After a week of little sleep because Missy kept waking up and wanting to play in the middle of the night, Cowboy was kind of over the co-sleeping. And, after months of watching parent-after-parent in our library group – not to mention several bloggers who I follow – get knocked up with #2 while I pine for AF like an 8th grader, I am kind of over the night nursing.

Rule number 1 with co-sleeping is that if you resent it, change it. So last night Cowboy rode pole position in the nursery chair while I tried to sleep. It was lonely without Missy snuggled up. No Cowboy either. Sigh. I still woke every time she cried. I was impressed that Cowboy got her back to sleep without too much of a struggle. Impressed and incredulous. He managed to do in one night what I have been putting off for months.

I was also a bit sad during the night: my baby no longer needed just me.

This morning, however, thoughts of liberation are seeping in. She no longer needs just ME. I can go on a business trip or a girl’s weekend and know – confidently know – that she won’t fall apart.

I might. But she will handle it.

Just like she handles her own spoon. It is a little messy but she gets it done.

It Walks

Perfect Moment Monday

She's tired - awakened by the DIY fireworks along the otherwise quiet lakeshore - and wants her momma.

In her striped jammies, clutching her blanket and bunny, we watch. Snuggled close, cheek-to-cheek, we gaze up at the sparkles and booms.

A long-held dream come true.

Kill Your Television

I’ve always secretly admired those bumper stickers.

It is estimated that 2.5 million Americans have not made the switch to digital TV – and therefore have no TV. Meet three of them.

Cowboy and I had cable and then satellite TV for a long time. About four years ago, we got rid of pay-for-TV after we realized that most of the programs started to seem the same (we never had the premium channels like HBO). We went from hundreds of channels to 5-and-1/2. I say one-half because ABC was always kind of fuzzy.

During my first year as a mom, I came to loathe TV. I don’t watch it during the day. And it always seemed that if there was some random program on I wanted to watch, Missy obliged her momma by waking up as much as possible during it. Or, I would wait all day to watch "The Office" and then fall to sleep 10 minutes into the show. (Um, we don’t have TiVo.) Often, I would get pissed if Cowboy kicked backed and watched TV while I was soothing Missy. How dare him watch "Two-and-a-Half Men" after working 13 hours at the office!

I know. Completely irrational.

Aforementioned shows and Oregon Public Broadcasting notwithstanding, it just seemed to us that free TV got worse as we got closer to the switch.

So we purposefully opted out. And life is good. We honestly aren’t missing much.

These days I get super-annoyed with commentators and people-with-opinions who assume that folks who have not made the switch to digital cannot figure out how to do it. As if – GOD FORBID how un-American – your life is not complete without TV.

We still watch TV occasionally by renting shows we actually want to watch from Netflix. We get our news from NPR or The Economist. We don’t let Missy watch TV so she’s not missing anything.

Instead, we do projects around the house. Or bake. Or read. Or other fun things you can do when your kid is asleep.

I’m beginning to like life in the slow lane.

I wonder how many more of us are out there.

Missy and the Girls

Or I guess another apt title would be: you reap what you sow.

I live in a region of the U.S. that has one of the highest rates of American breast-fed babies. It is just as common to breast feed in public as it is to shake up a bottle of formula. No one bats an eye. Until your kid can walk up to you and nurse, that is. That still seems to skeeve people out. Even if they do sport a "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker on their Prius.

At 1 year, Missy doesn’t seem close to walking. Which is great. Because she is so not close to weaning either.

I don’t mean to suggest that I would raise my child based on what I perceive are the perceptions from total strangers – or even good friends. But after 1 year of age, it seems like the scale goes quickly from "my, what a healthy thing for your baby," to "good lord, when is that kid going to get off the boob."

Don’t get me wrong. I really, really, really wanted breast feeding to go well for us. So much so that I forbade the nurses in L&D to give Missy a pacifier in her early days for fear that she wouldn’t develop a good latch.

Where my body failed me with pregnancies, my girls made up for it in spades. Nursing was easy as pie for Missy and me. Now it has gone so well that I fear that Missy won’t be inclined to give it up too soon.

She still insists on nursing to sleep for naps and night-night. We are working slowly at dropping the nursing session for her morning nap. But she also nurses in the night a few times. I can count on one hand the number of times she has slept through the night since her birth. Over a year ago. Sigh.

When we go out – which is almost never because we spent all of our money on day care at the mountain – I leave a sippy cup of expressed milk for the sitter and Missy won’t touch it. She goes to sleep for Cowboy and the sitter with no milk and only a little fussing before putting her head down on their shoulders. But for me, she literally shoves her way down to the girls and gets seriously pissed off if I don’t oblige. Which I resent. Just a tiny, tiny bit.

During the day, I comfort her with hugs, kisses and distractions -– thank goodness it is so easy to distract a toddler. At night, however, it is just easier for everyone to let her have a little nursing sesh and we all go right back to sleep. Besides, I can see my refusal becoming a battle of wills. And with a mother-daughter Taurus combo, I don’t anticipate a fabulous outcome in that scenario.

But – and this is so Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret – but I really want my period to come. I am seriously jealous when I hear about other new moms getting AF. Nursing - specifically the night nursing - is preventing my auntie from returning for a visit.

On the other hand, I want to have my cake and eat it, too. Because I don’t want to force-wean Missy when she (I?) is clearly not ready. What if I wean her and give up the close bonding we have and then I piss her off and she needs years of therapy as a teen? Only so that we can try again before my eggs dry up (and, trust me, that window is getting very, very small). Yeah, because all that timed sex and thermometer-induced rage was super positive for our marriage. Maybe we won’t even have another successful outcome.

Gosh, I sound like such a chicken shit.

But at least I have a great looking rack.

365

My baby turned 1 today.

We celebrated at a vineyard with a picnic of cupcakes and wine.

The day was lovely. Perfect weather. The still snow-capped Cascade Mountains in the distance.

So on this gorgeous day our baby turned 1. And we toasted our first year of parenthood.

I have so much to say about the past 365 days that I don't know where to begin.

Earth Day 2009: You, too, can do this

Happy Earth Day everyone! It seems like everyone in bloggerville has a favorite holiday where they do something fun on their blog. So I claim Earth Day.

Last year, I wrote how every year we try to do something better for the environment. One year we stopped using papertowels. This coming year we are investing in a CSA so our produce will come from a local, organic farm. The goal is to make our change a habit, so we continue to live more sustainable existence.

It occurred to me that I never wrote much about our 2008-09 Earth Day resolution: to use cloth diapers.

To be honest, I was afraid I would do the first load of poopy diapers and fail miserably at keeping the resolution.

And then we found the holy grail of cloth diapering your kid: the bumGenius 3.0.

Of all the products and brands in Missy’s life (and there are a lot), one of my hands down favorites is her bumGenius 3.0 cloth diapers.

The bumGenius is truly genius. It makes cloth diapering a cinch. Show a BG to your mom and watch a wave of jealousy roll across her face. You can practically see the thought-balloon over her head: why didn’t they have these when I had my kids?

I joke about being a hippie. I have a hippie streak in me that runs a mile deep. But you do not have to even be marginally hippie to cloth diaper your kid. Especially not if you use BG diapies.

My goal is not to pontificate. By gosh, if you have a diaper brand or system that works for you, by all means, keep at it. Life is complicated enough. But if you are reading this and have even an inkling that you’d like to try cloth diapering, then consider the BGs.

You can visit the BG website to check out all the product attributes, so I won’t bore you with details. The things I really love about them include:

(1) We are not clogging up a landfill with diapers.
(2) There are no chemicals near my daughter’s body (I don’t actually know what is in the diaper lining of disposables that becomes a gel-like substance when babies pee on it. That’s because manufacturers don’t have to list the contents. But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if it is non-chemical).
(3) BGs are super easy to clean. You literally toss them in your washer. 2 cycles of wash and they come out white as snow. I shake out the solid poop in the toilet, but Missy was almost 8 months old before I had to start doing this. As a side note, before I had a kid, I super-skeeved out on all the poop stuff. With your own baby, however, it is kind of like scooping your own dog’s poop. It doesn’t bum you out too much.
(4) There is very little smell from the diaper pail because we "do the diapies" (as we call our diapie washing exploits) every other day. Which sounds like a lot, but the practice has become rote.

Doing the diapies adds approximately 6 loads to laundry duty per week because you wash the BGs once on cold and then again on hot. Trust me. 4-6 additional loads of laundry in the scope of how much your laundry will increase is nothin’.

Some may point out that it takes more energy to wash diapers over and over as opposed to simply throwing away disposables but that argument fails to point out how much energy it takes to produce & ship three years worth of disposable diapers per kid. Our 20 BGs were made once. And shipped once. Because they adjust to sizes from 8-35 lbs., we’ll use these until Missy is potty trained. Or if we have another kid. Or we’ll re-sell them. The going rate for used BG 3.0s in Portland is 50% of what we paid for them.

We started out using a diaper service with our own set of diaper wraps. And this was a super way to get on the cloth diaper train. But then the service raised its rates and Missy outgrew the wraps, which cost nearly as much as each BG. All of a sudden being a hippie wasn’t so cost-effective. You can be sure Cowboy did the math.

The BGs have only 2 drawbacks. First, they are spendy. We invested $350 in our set of 20 diapies but we consider it a capital investment. Depreciated over the cost of 2-3 years (not to mention kid #2 should we be that lucky), it is a pittance of what disposables would run.

Another side note, a trendy thing in Portland is to hold a baby shower where every guest brings a small gift + one BG diaper to help the parents-to-be complete their diaper stash.

Second, most cute baby pants, especially constructed ones such as jeans or corduroys, do not work well with cloth diapers in general because the rise on the pants are too short to fit over the baby’s bubble butt. So we do the cute one-piece rompers instead. A small sacrifice in my book.

Anyway, I hope that this post convinced at least one person to try cloth diapering. There is so much information and a plethora of products out there that it is daunting to figure out. I did a lot of groundwork to arrive at the BGs as a solution. Just thought I’d pass on the good word.

What have you done this year to minimize your impact on the environment? Please post your cool ideas in my comments section. I'd love to hear what everyone is up to.

Or you can just call me a flippin' hippie. It will make me laugh.

Happy Easter

I don't know why, but I love Easter. I love the bunnies. I love piecing together the perfect basket. I even love Peeps. When I was in graduate school and was so broke that I routinely had, like, only $12 to my name, I still managed to pull together a little basket for Cowboy when we were dating.

This year was Missy's first basket. Since her new skill is removing the entire contents of anything resembling a container, she was in heaven. And, of course, for all the sweet, carefully procured items bestowed on her by the Easter Bunny, she liked the 65-cent plastic eggs the best.

My delight in assembling my daughter's first basket was only slightly marred by my inability to eat heaps of chocolate eggs and bunnies this year.

Despite nearing the ripe ol' age of one, Missy still suffers from reflux. Her meds help but if I even look at a piece of chocolate, a cup of coffee or a bottle of Pinot, she projectile vomits.

Once I discovered that these items set her off, I stopped having them for months. Then, one day I discovered a teeny, tiny stash of chocolate chips in the cupboard.

Throw them away. They make her reflux act up, said the good momma angel.

Oh, c'mon, she's almost a year old for chrissakes. Maybe it no longer affects her, said the bad momma devil.

Naturally, I went with the bad momma devil. I mean, there was chocolate involved.

And poor Missy vomited the night away. That'll learn me.

So I'm off all the good stuff. Until I wean her.

Then I'm gonna bake the biggest, baddest chocolate cake and eat the shit out of it.

Hola!

We have just returned from the forbidden land of

Which is equal parts beauty

And sad desperation

But the sand tasted fabulous

Lest you think I am nutty-cakes for taking a baby to Cuba, we traveled there legally to visit family who are in the foreign service. Taxes, teething and travel have taken all of March. I promise to post more in April. Really.

Leaving me to ponder, is a blog really a blog if you don't write in it?

Mid-winter

Snapped while Missy learned to stand in her crib as we played peek-a-boo. Apparently - according to Missy - the only thing her crib is good for is learning to stand.

When we painted the walls this color, I had no idea it would match her eyes.

On why I don't want a new blog

My MIL just left our house, heading back to the Lone Star State. Before she did, she mistakenly called my husband by his older brother's name about 50 times and asked me at least thrice when we are going to have a little boy.

As if I have a choice in either of those two matters.

When I have a few spare minutes, I sincerely enjoy popping over to some of my formerly-IF friends' new mommy blogs. I lurk and more often than not find myself chuckling or nodding in agreement at posts. I've thought about starting a new blog myself. The only thing stopping me is karma.

See, according to my fucked up karma logic, the minute I leave my infertility blog for another space is the minute I will start obsessing about having another baby. And then I won't be able to. And then the whole vicious cycle with begin anew.

I'm already plotting. Let's see. Hmmm. Missy will be 1 in May. I can wean her over the summer and be pregnant by fall...

Riiiiiight.

But the saddest part is that I actually think these things. Nothing like a victory to make you think you are impervious.

Anyway. So that's why I haven't started a new blog. That and because being a full time mom and working part-time running my own business, I feel a serious lack of time and creativity. Instead I will just admire all of the other creativity out there.

First Season

After an unseasonably warm and dry fall, which kept the mountain from opening earlier, storm after storm has rolled in off the Pacific. The most recent one has coupled with a trough of Arctic air fresh from Alaska. Feet of very un-Cascade-like fluffy snow are piling up.

I am crouched in the camper with my helmet and goggles on, listening to the avy bombs go off, furiously working a hand pump because the electric one draws too much power. The folks at Arc’teryx should know that their garments are just as good repelling breast milk as they are at repelling the elements. I am waiting for our 7-month-old to wake up from her morning nap so I can haul her, 2 blankies, 6 diapers and 8-ounces of freshly-pumped milk to the mountain day care and still be near the front of the lift line when it opens.

This is not a complaint in the least. Just a testimony to the extra dedication it takes to get the goods when you have a baby in tow. But skiing is what we do. Nearly every weekend in fact. Pick up the camper on Thursday night. Pack it on Friday. Drive to the hill Friday night. Ski Saturday and Sunday. Spend 48 hours with two grown-ups, a baby, a golden retriever and all our gear in less than 100 square feet. Drive home.

The first few times we do it, it takes immense effort to inventory, pack and keep track of all the baby essentials we might need while camped in the mountain parking lot. Add to that the general list of gear we normally take with us: Gloves, goggles, extra lenses. Check, check, and check. A case of PBR, cans of soup, oatmeal packets. Got ‘em. Sippy cup, thermometer, Good Night Moon. Sheesh.

You begin to understand why some people drop out for a few years when they have young babies. But our first date was to the mountain. So it makes sense that – for us – having a kid after years of grown-up playtime wouldn’t change what we do.

We find a rhythm as the season progresses. Powder days mean springing for a full day of care. Typical conditions equal a half-day of care. Not-so-sweet days mean we do the hand off in the camper, trying to time feedings and naps with which parent has her.

We used to enjoy apres drinks and a big plate of nachos at the lodge. But now that cash goes to the mountain day care center. On the way home on Sunday afternoon, I gaze at the down-swaddled bundle with the toothless smile nestled in her car seat between us in the cab of the truck. I eat my tuna sandwich and wouldn’t have it any other way.