should we cancel christmas too?

My top three holidays, in order of fabulousness:
1. My Birthday
2. Halloween
3. The last day of Daylight Savings Time

All that came crashing down on me last night when I was delivered a one-two punch directly to the gut. I heard an unsubstantiated rumor that this is the last year that we will be celebrating the glorious tradition of adding an hour of sleep to our night, waking in the morning to brilliantly sunny skies at the crack of dawn, and having an extremely productive Sunday due to the hiccup in the time/space continuum. Could this be true? I feel as though it is my Constitutional right to have just one measly day with an extra hour. It is almost unAmerican. Just one more reason why I didn't vote for Bush.

As if that wasn't bad enough, my long night was full of a screamy, hungry, sick, recovering baby. Dave was wonderfully heroic about the whole thing, almost making up for the fact that I was wide awake at the first two o'clock, the second two o'clock, and the new four o'clock which is the old five o'clock, which is only the most awesome hour of sleep in existance. Almost makes up for it, but not quite.

I wait for this night for an entire year, and a 28 inch-long loudmouth goes and ruins it for me. Little brat. And of course Jake's belly isn't on the clock anymore, so he was up and ready at the new six o'clock. That's why I drink coffee, and lots of it.

I haven't been so bitter since no one remembered my birthday until well past noon on my sixteenth birthday. I am probably the only child to get yelled at and grounded by ten a.m. on what is supposed to be the sweetest day of her entire life. I had it rough.

And so help me if my Jack O'Lantern gets peed in again this year.
Heads will roll.

all done!

Everything went really well yesterday. We were in at 7am and out by 1pm, and the hours actually went by pretty quickly. The doctor was nice, the nurses were great, and the waiting room was full of crying parents. That last part sucked. I met a woman who thought that her thirteen month-old son had a sinus infection or a sore throat and it turns out that he has a cancerous growth throughout his entire face muscles. Even worse, it is a super rare kind of cancer and it is the same thing that killed her first husband a decade ago. Stay out of Reading folks, sounds like there is something in the water.

Jake is feeling pretty good thanks to Tylenol 3, but I think he is kind of bored. No exersaucers no knee bounces no fun for two weeks. Just a lot of cuddling and floor time. He is acting pretty normally, but he is trying to nurse (through my clothes, there is nothing weird going on here) which I thought he totally forgot about. Poor guy. Nothing is coming out of those dried-up momsacs. He has a 1.5 inch scar along the top of his pubic area and everything below looks really swollen and mangled and gross. I'll spare you the actual visual, but of course I'll send pictures if you are as fascinated with medical anomalies as I am. Let me know.

Speaking of which, I'm missing a really good surgery on Discovery Health. I've gotta go.

ketchup

I am finally back home after a long weekend. Where to start, where to start? From the very beginning is a very good place to start, according to my favorite movie of all time.

Friday I took Jake to the hospital for his final weigh-in before his surgery. He is a hefty 17.5 pounds (almost to the thirtieth percentile! thanks to his two pound spurt over the past month) and 27.5 inches long (holding right at the seventy-fifth with a half inch jump since his six month check up). He kind of has a cold, and they won't operate if he is sick. We'll see what the week brings.

Dave and I went dropped Jake off at his aunt's and went to a wedding later Friday evening. Dave was all dressed up and coifed, and I- well, apparently I wore a brown dress. Never give a man a camera. They are only interested in scotch whiskey and zoom lenses.

Saturday morning was spent in a car driving up to Erie to see the folks up there, and Jake had his first piece of toast, saw some family, and got mobile. I should really be vacuuming and picking up so Jake doesn't swallow/touch/break any foreign objects (read:MY stuff), but I'm more interested in getting some words down for you and setting up the playpen so Jake can't get into one of the many floor hazards present.

Jake isn't technically crawling, but he is eagerly inch-worming himself forward and back and has abandoned rolling for his butt-raising, toe-grapling, and elbow-creeping. He can move about four or five feet in any direction, and this may change my life even more than child birth did.

Oh God.

IR list

In the past ten days I've managed to probably break my tailbone and most likely get a concussion.

The tailbone incident was baby-related, when I sat down on a teething rattle, and the concussion was both work-related and alcohol-related. I hit my head on a door frame while I was walking around my office pretending to look busy while reading a file. Then I hit the same spot on the car door frame while coming home from happy hour(s). I would have hit it if I didn't go to the bar too, so I don't want to hear it. I probably wouldn't have hit it so hard though, and I wouldn't have been in a car in the first place. Lesson learned. Always take the subway. My life is hard. Putting together a sentence while dealing with a throbbing head wound is hard.

The head is doing much better these days, though I still can feel my pulse in it when I bend over and the side of my head is a little greenish from the bruise. But things aren't feeling so well at the other end. I can hardly sit down and walking is painful. Whatever you do, don't eat the bag of carrots in my freezer. It has seen places on me that the sun hasn't. It is marked with an X and is in the door, away from the untainted veggies.

So, that is where I've been. And I've been working a lot so when I get home the last thing I want to do is look at a computer screen.

In baby news, I finally managed to get Jake out to the countryside. My friend Melanie and I took the babies to Linvilla Orchards in Delaware County on Sunday. Jake was happy to be outside, and he loves Julianna (who is just a few days younger than he) but he was kind of spazzy all day long. He seems very frustrated that he can't get up and run around.

Those teeth are still waiting to pop through. They are right on the surface and every few days a corner will pop up and then his gums will swell over it. This has been happening for about four months now. I thought he was going to be an early teether when those two bottoms started to come in, but no.

Jake turned seven months old yesterday, and has a big long list of things he can do. He loves to bounce, try to stand up, roll over, play with anything he can get his little hands on, and he is starting to eat better. Finally. He's eating all sorts of fruits and veggies now, and he is starting to practice his pincher grasp with the things he finds on our floor. I haven't given him any biscuits, toast or fruit puffs yet. Jake doesn't really chew on things so I think it is a lost cause. Plus, it is hard enough to get him to eat his meals. He doesn't need any snacks in between to ruin his appetite. I'm starting to decrease the amount of formula he is getting, since he is getting about eight ounces more than a seven month old baby should be. But, he drinks it and it has more nutrition than the solid foods, so I'm not rushing things.

I'm doing pretty well seven months out too. I'm starting to re-up my coolness by getting back into society a little better. Work is going well, and I have given up on keeping a neat house. It almost doesn't stress me out to walk into a living room of baby toys any more. Almost. Laundry is always done but never put away, and dishes are usually done before the stink sets in. I didn't freak out this morning when Jake's eye was sealed shut with babyeye goo and knotted eyelashes, so that must be some indication of level headedness.

Or maybe I was just to tired to deal.

i am healed!

All went well with the Lasik on Saturday, and although I'm not at 20/20 yet, I am certainly close. The doctor said to give it a week or two, as the procedure I had done was "pretty intense". It was three minutes per eye (I guess most normal people need about a minute, maybe two) and the worst part of it was breathing in particles of my own eyeball during the surgery. It smelled kind of wet and grainy, like your tooth does when you are getting a cavity filled.

The doctor and his staff were so nice and attentive that I didn't really feel nervous at all, and I went home hopped up on Xanax and loaded myself up on Tylenol PM, just like the doctor ordered. It was the best sleep I've had since the labor and delivery nurse gave me a Benedryl at about hour 15 of contractions. Who knew that allergy medicine + labor = greatest.nap.ever? When I woke up seven hours later things were a little cloudy, but I could manage to do laundry and dishes before falling asleep again for another ten hours. Baby, you ask? What baby? I was out.

At day three things are still a bit blurry up close and really far away, but I can see just as well as I could with the glasses. My eyes are dry and a little itchy, and I'm putting drops in them every half hour. I have four different ones that need to go in there throughout the day, but I'll be down to two after tomorrow. I go back for a check up next Monday, and then at one month, three months, six months, and one year. My eyes are guaranteed for life, so if they need to tweak things later I won't have to worry about spending another arm and a leg for repairs.

And just in case I had any doubts about the surgery: After getting out of the shower on Saturday morning, I went into my room and noticed Tyler sitting in a laundry basket on the floor. Because I am the crazy lady who talks to her cats, I asked her how and where she slept, what she dreamt about, if she needs any food, and told her all about what I was going to do that day. Because Tyler is the crazy cat who answers her lady, I was surprised when she was so quiet. I reached into the basket to pick her up and ended up with two handfuls of the green sweater that I wore to work on Friday. Nice. It was definitely time to do something about the vision.

baby's first surgery

Jake went to the urologist yesterday, and just as his pediatrician thought it looks like his testicle isn't going to descend on it's own. The doctor we met with is the surgeon who will be performing the surgery on the 26th, and I liked him well enough to let him dig around in my baby. He has been doing this for nearly 30 years and it will be done at CHOP, which is the oldest and one of the best children's hospitals in the country. It is a routine outpatient procedure, which is nice.

Because Jake's testicle is in the inguinal canal and he may have a hernia keeping it in there, a few incisions will be made in his abdomen and scrotum. The recovery time is about two weeks, and he won't be able to straddle anything during that time. No walkers, exersaucers, jumpy toys, rides on knees, or supporting him with a hand between the legs while I'm struggling to feed the cat and do some laundry and write a check to the gas company and keep Jake held and happy all at the same time. I'll spare you further gory details, if you are interested in reading more click here. As the urologist said, basically we will "just be putting the old 8 ball in the corner pocket". Cute, but I bet he tells that joke at least ten times per day. Multiply that times thirty years and you have a gaggle of nurses that are so over hearing that. And I'm so over saying testicle just to be polite. Ball, ball, ball, nutsack.

I can't say that I am worried about the procedure, but it sure doesn't feel good to say "I had to schedule surgery for my son today, and we meet with the anesthesiologist on the twentieth". Go ahead and say it out loud. Sucks, doesn't it? Of course we all know the risks with general anesthesia, but I have been put under at least twice that I can remember and I obviously made it through okay. And then there was that local I had for Jake's delivery. I came out of that in record time. I don't know anyone who has ever had any lingering effects from anesthesia, so I am pretty confident that Jake will be okay too. It is just sad to think of him with his eyes taped shut and a tube helping him breath and wires hooked up to his little chest, but things could be worse.

Spending a couple hours in a children's hospital was not fun at all. We were in the building that houses urology and oncology, which is a horrible combination. You could be there because your pee pee doesn't work right or you can be there because your innards are rotting just as fast as they are growing. Parents look at one another in hope and desperation, and everyone forces a smile and says "hello" and "best of luck" and "God's blessings", just in case.

The support staff, nurses, and doctors were all fantastic, and I found it odd that everyone seemed to be surprised that Jake was only six months old. I know he is longish, and has the face of a toddler and the hair of- well- his father, but I couldn't help but wonder if he just one of the healthiest babies they see there. The urologist called him husky, the nurse called him a bruiser, the intake worker asked me three times if I was sure that his birth weight was really only 5 lbs 12 oz, and the receptionist said that he is one of the biggest six month old babies she has ever seen. In truth, he really isn't all that monstrous. Very sad. When I was in the waiting room talking to other mothers, I was shocked that the babies that looked to be three or four months old were really six or seven months old. Kids that seemed like kindergarteners were well into grade school. It was horrible. Best of luck and God's blessings to those children indeed.

and on a more positive note...

Jake is two hundred days old today. I remember looking forward to ending that hundred day war that was the first three and a half months of his life. A lot has changed since then, but his unconditional love for that stupid caterpillar and it's tinny little songs about colors and numbers and munching lady bugs and his fascination with that damned aquarium with those fish that just won't stop swimming in circles and the warpy lullaby music that broadcasts at ten decibels over the baby monitor at 3am when Jake decides to play "quietly" is still going strong. Hmm, maybe it is time to dip into the toy bag in the basement in order to up my sanity a bit.

Oh, and there won't be any pictures today, because Jake is having one of those big head days. His body will surely catch up by the seven month mark, which is quickly approaching. Unbelievable.