Silver linings to overpriced regions of the country
So, it sounds like our thrift and consignment stores here have a slightly better selection than some of the other places.
Finally! A reason to be thankful for all the people who can afford our insanely high cost of living and the stores that cater to them!
The brands I see on a regular to semi-regular basis, both thrifting and at consignment:
- Baby Lulu
- Baby Gap
- Old Navy
- Flapdoodles
- Le Top
- Hanna Andersson
- Baby N
- Gymboree
- Robeez
We do have a lot of Nordstroms around here (on account of being where it started and all), which would explain a few of the above. We also have one of the few actual Hanna Andersson stores, and enough expensive and pretentious baby boutiques to keep the consignment stores
and the thrift stores well-stocked with high-end brands. I paid 69 cents for her periwinkle Gymboree leggings, and most of her rompers (mainly Hanna and Baby Gap) came from the dollar overstock rack at Kids on 45th or from Goodwill. Almost every consignment store also sells new Robeez, so most of them have at least a half-dozen used pairs at any given moment.
Stephanie: for dresses, I put her in leggings or stretch pants, with the dress over that. Most of her dresses in heavy rotation are comfortable and stretchy cotton-based ones, so leggings and stretchy pants look cute with them instead of weird.
Names, sweetie darling. Names.
I have to confess, I'm one of those Hanna Andersson addicts.
Not enough of one to actually spend full retail, or even on-sale retail, but enough of one to patiently plough through racks and racks of used baby clothing at Goodwill and Sally Ann for one or two pieces per visit. And, of course, there's always eBay, where I'm willing to spend a little more, because the condition's a little better and there are actual choices. If it's something really cute, I'll break my no clothing over $20 rule, especially for striped Hanna pieces. The brighter and more obnoxious the stripes, the better.
I'm not the mother I thought I'd be in any number of ways, and one of them is baby clothing. I think I pictured myself putting the baby in those special occasion puffs of taffeta and netting more often than once a dress size, for starters. Dress up was going to be a daily thing.
Her first three months, she pretty much lived in Onesies. My practical streak rose up and staged a wardrobe coup.
We've expanded more into shirts, comfortable dresses, and cozy soft pants as she's grown bigger and the weather's grown colder, but the underlying principle of what to wear remains the same: it has to be comfortable for her, and it has to be easy for me to wash. There are, of course, bonus points for comfortable, easy clothing that's also cute as a bug's ear.
Thus the Hanna addiction.
I hear there's an outlet store in Lake Oswego.
That's only about 3 hours away, and I could hit Powell's en route.
I'm so doomed.
Solo acts
Reading Julie's
One and only post last week got me thinking about our family size.
It took us years to grow from two to three, and there was a time when we were fairly certain it wouldn't ever happen. Heck, two months before I got pregnant, I was busy remapping my vague future plans to fit a childless lifestyle. Not, I should stress, without a certain amount of bitterness and bile simmering just below my attempts to find infertility's silver lining.
After all those years of trying, I have one child. I'm content to leave it there.
One is all I ever wanted, and after our less-than-peaceful pregnancy, the boy's pretty happy with that number, too. I do not, by the way, recommend a high-risk pregnancy complete with bed rest, medication, and all the trimmings (short of an emergency C-section and a NICU stay--we lucked out in that regard) as a way of coming to agreement on how many kids you'll have.
I have one child, and yet I am still occasionally struck with a baby longing so fierce it knocks me backwards.
For a while, I wondered if I'd gone completely off my rocker and decided I wanted a second. Leaving aside the potential health risks, babies are the opposite of cheap, and I have my hands full with just the girl.
Then it struck me today: I have baby longing, but it's a very specific sort, and there's no satisfying it short of hijacking a TARDIS. The baby I yearn to touch and hold is the one sleeping next to me right now, only younger and smaller. When I think of a newborn, the one I picture is the one she was, the first smiles and first teeth and first solid meals I see are hers.
I don't want a second baby, I just want to be able to reach back in time and savor all the little moments with this one that passed by too quickly. As trite as it sounds when you say it, it really does go so fast. At 9 months, I see the toddler-to-be more often than I see the newborn-that-was. I look at her first pictures and try to remember what it felt like to hold something so small.
I never can, not really.
But lord, I wish I could.
Dear diary, today I pumped in the restroom.
Honestly--and I hate to say it--it wasn't that bad.
For starters, it was actually a little more relaxing than pumping at my desk had been. At least in the restroom, I can lock my stall door. Despite having a closed door with a sign on it, I've been walked in on more than once. More than twice, even.
Maybe I should have put a cow on the sign.
Anyhow, let me assure you, constantly expecting
that was hell on my letdown.
Over time, I'm sure I'll come to find using the restroom for pumping kind of--well, disgusting and degrading are two words that spring to mind. But that's the future (okay, probably next week). Today had the sort of "Gosh, I feel like I've added to my Pumping Mother Street Cred Uphill Both Ways!" feel to it, which managed to effectively negate most of the negative.
Woohoo!
(Despite the lack of a mother's room where I'm working, I do have other, non-toilet stall options available, but they're logistically quite a bit more difficult.)
Fuzzi Bunz: I feel like I've joined a cult.
I never expected to get into cloth diapering the way I have. At best, I figured it would be an easy way to cut costs without too much suffering on our part.
When I did find myself getting a wee bit obsessive about the things, I told myself that at least I hadn't fallen prey to the pocket diaper craze. This somehow made me feel more in control of the diaper addiction, in the "Oh, but at least I only drink wine, not hard liquor!" sort of way.
A couple of weeks ago, while on eBay during a break, I saw someone had listed a lime green petite toddler sized FB with a reasonable buy-it-now. I bought, it came, it conquered.
Not only was it lime green, a color I love in ways that are not good for me, it was every bit as good as I'd heard through the diaper grapevine. It was love, if not at first sight, at least at first overnight, when we had a hard time telling if she was wet or not. Oh, and even stuffed with a regular prefold, it was trim.
As the girl will still easily fit in a medium (much easier to find than the petite), and I've been watching eBay like a hawk, we now have seven Fuzzi Bunz, two Happy Heinys, and an assortment of inserts. There's a Wonderoo on its way. My watch list is, as they say in the Cult of Cloth, chock full o' fluff. I'm sold. Converted. Evangelical, even. They live up to the hype.
(Oh, and in the Happy Heinys vs. Fuzzi Bunz debate, I'm still undecided. I think the HHs are a little more sturdy, but the FBs feel drier AND have snaps instead of velcro, which makes a difference when your child has learned the wonders of pulling off the velcro tabs.)
There's no use crying, blah blah blah.
I suppose I should be grateful that the girl is failing to meet her performance goals in the daytime eating department. After all, this failure means that the 2.5oz of milk that just went the way of the dodo due to acute seal failure won't mean I can't meet tomorrow's demand. Go team tarnished silver lining.
I checked the seals before I left work. I was worried--as I have been since the first time I f'ed up the seal on a container and lost a full 4oz--that things hadn't closed quite right. They all looked peachy.
When I got home, one of the bags had managed to spill its precious f-ing contents all over my carrying bag, the boy's bag, and probably the car. Which will no doubt have the lingering odor of soured milk on hot days, just to mock me. It'll add just the right touch to the occasional doggie smell left there from the previous owners' pets.
Murph, buddy, your law can bite me.
As can the notion that hydration would help.
I hydrated all day yesterday and today, thank you kindly, and my reward was more trips to the bathroom, not more milk.
I'm trying to decide if I'll look back at this and laugh, or look back at this and seek therapy.
And ANOTHER thing...
You know the worst part?
I keep having flashes where I beat myself up for having formed such a tight dyad with the girl, knowing that I'd eventually have to go back to work and break it up.
I am beating myself up. For bonding with my child.
How messed up is that? I mean, think about it: part of me feels that I've done harm to my child by providing a warm, secure, nurturing environment for her first 8 months. And I can't help it, because it feels like I've done a huge bait-and-switch on her.
I know we were lucky to have those 8 months. I do. I know most people in the US don't get that long before having to go back to work.
But I've got this visceral anger eating me up right now, and that makes it hard to feel the lucky. I'm angry at the lack of decent maternity leave in this country, and I'm angry the lack of more than lip service support for working mothers, especially the nursing ones. Most of all, I'm angry at myself. For needing to go back to work, for wanting to go back to work, for leaving her in daycare all day long, for having pumping problems, and for not somehow managing to prepare us both for all of the above back when the days were ours.
Feeding frenzy
I'd be the first to admit that I'm a little stressed out. In a bit of a funk. At the end of my rope.
We're having Food Issues.
The girl had her 9 month checkup today. She's doing quite well, except they're a little concerned about how little she eats during the day. I can't say as I blame them, seeing as she's actually down almost half a pound from when we took her in a month ago during the baby plague days. I mean, she's no longer refusing to eat at daycare like she was for the first few weeks, but she's not exactly pigging out.
On a really spectacularly good day at daycare, she's taking a couple small meals of solids and about 10oz of milk. Which is, according to what the boy reported, about 14 fewer than she should be. Did I mention that, as I work a good 20 miles from home, I couldn't be at her appointment? It's the first one I've missed. I'm relying on secondhand information, and let us face it, the boy's not the best at knowing which are the important details. Anyhow. Yes. She should be taking more milk. We usually send around 12oz with her. When we started, we sent more, but with the hunger strike, it just went to waste.
Time to up the amount in the bottles. Unfortunately, I've barely been able to keep up with the demand as it is, and my pumping output's been doing the opposite of improving.
Worse, I'm getting an officemate soon (I was lucky to have a month without one). While I could hum a few bars and fake a space to pump, the fact of the matter is that, if I have to start limiting the time I spend pumping because I can't do it at my desk, my production's going to plummet. (Yes, I know you're not supposed to pump for as long as I do--at least 45 minutes, usually--but if I don't, I wind up with nearly-empty bottles and uncomfortable tits.) If she starts taking more via bottle, we'll probably have to try supplementing, but given her dislike of new tastes (and, if I'm honest, my dislike of the whole idea of formula, from the various marketing evils to the vile smell of the stuff*), I can't see that ending in any way but tears on both our parts.
We're supposed to encourage her to eat more protein and fat-rich solids.
She's a picky eater.
Attempts at said solids tonight resulted in very little food inside the baby.
I'll be here in the corner, banging my head against a brick wall and cursing just about everything.
* I have, in fact, fed formula to babies I've looked after. I've mixed it up, fed it with love, and never, ever, ever managed to get over the way it smells. Plus, that stuff costs an arm and a leg, and as I've already had to sign over my limbs to cover daycare, I can't really afford it.
Nipple Confusion
No, not the girl. Me.
See, since the girl was born, I've been pumping with an ancient loaner Ameda Purely Yours, a pump that has served many of my friends well through the years. And it has been a fabulous pump, if the word fabulous can really be applied to something that makes a person feel even more bovine than when looking at Vogue spreads. However, in recent weeks, faced with thrice-daily pumping, it's been making cranky, sickly noises.
As the current keeper of the collective pump, I deemed it my duty to find a replacement before passing it on to the next pumper. And so I did, getting a good deal on a new pump via eBay. The new pump, I should mention, is the same as the old pump. Sure, they changed the style a little, and the font on the front is different, but that's about it.
It arrived yesterday. Thrilled by its shiny newness, I put it in my bag and brought it to the office with me today, where I promptly unplugged Pump 1.0 and plugged in Pump 2.0 and eagerly awaited my first session (well, as eagerly as one can--like fabulous, it's not a word that really goes with pumping), only to find myself frantically flipping through baby pictures in a desperate attempt to achieve letdown. Sessions two and three were worse than session one, and by the end of the day, my productivity in the boob department was down a full 25%.
Pump 2.0, while as loud as Pump 1.0, has a steady, whineless beat. No hiccups or wheezes, no moments when I think it's about to die on me. And there, I fear, lies the problem. I'm conditioned to letdown to the whines and stutters, and my poor breasts have been thrown for a loop by the sudden change.
By the end of the third session, the only way I was getting anything out was to start pumping with Pump 1.0 and then quickly swapping the power and hose back to 2.0. If tomorrow doesn't bring better results, I'm afraid I'm going to have to break out the freezer stash...
The last three or so weeks in brief
Work good.
Colds bad. All three of us got hit by the crud that first week, and we're not 100% yet.
Daycare so-so. She's still not drinking much, so we're sending jars of food with her and she's eating some of that. Once she gets her paws on me after we're all home, I'm not really allowed to leave her sight. If she's sleeping and I leave the room, she wakes up most displeased.
Slight holiday-induced backsliding on the budget has occured, as between work, colds, and all the rest, we didn't have the time or energy to make things for people OR cook for ourselves.
In theory, we're back on the budget wagon now.
Umm, whee?
