Crafting, Family

Sick Baby

Kelly

Poor Bitmap has a cold, she’s been bringing them home from daycare on a regular basis. Which means that I’ve also had a cold pretty much nonstop for the last month. This one has hit her the hardest, she spent most of yesterday snoozing.

Bitmap and her dad

 

I did finally get around to making her a new hat. She outgrew her biggest one months ago, and I’ve been getting lots of dirty looks from nosy mothers who can’t believe I have her outside without a hat.

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The good news is that Bitmap is sleeping much better these days. She goes to bed at 9 and usually sleeps until about 5am, when she nurses and then goes back to sleep until 8. So I’m finally starting to get enough sleep to think straight. Which is good because I’ve picked up some more freelance WordPress dev work.

Aside from bringing home every germ on the planet, she’s really liking daycare. She’s pulling herself up to standing, and can walk around if she’s got something to lean on.

We still spend Mondays together, and maybe if it stops raining today we’ll go on a walk through the neighborhood. I can’t wait for spring.

Crafting

Giant Nikkor Lens of Doom

Kelly

When I was in high school I used my dad’s Nikon F camera a ton. It weighed approximately a million pounds and was twice my age but I loved the hell out of it. I was particularly proud of the fact that it was entirely mechanical and my dad had a huge collection of lenses for it (also completely mechanical; to this day I still find autofocus to be a little foreign).

Most of the lenses sat in the closet when I finally moved to a digital SLR, until a couple years ago when I got an adapter ring that lets you used the Nikon F-mount lenses on a Canon EOS body. Obviously none of the computerized features work, but the through-lens metering on my T4i does a pretty good job at exposing the shot. This weekend I pulled it out to use with my dad’s Nikkor 500m f/8 lens. It’s a short (for a 500) fat lens which we affectionately call “the Hubble  because it’s really best suited for taking pictures of the moon and other distant, slow-moving objects.

The church down the street (about 5 blocks away) fit that description well so I stuck the camera on a tripod and tested things out. I used the 2 second self-timer function on my camera so I wouldn’t jiggle the camera when pressing the shutter release. Because at 500mm even a tiny bit of jitter looks like a lot.

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It turns out the church is actually much too close to be able to do much shot composition. I had to back up about 15 feet from the window just to fit that much of it in the frame. What’s incredible to me is that you can see the individual bricks that make up the church. This church is far enough away that I can’t read the clock from my bedroom window. Turns out it’s wrong anyway.

Focusing the lens was a challenge. My camera has a “live preview” feature which lets you zoom in on sections of the frame, so I used the edge of the clock face to get things as sharp as I could (which isn’t very sharp with this lens).

The next day I took it to the zoo and got up close and personal with some of the animals.

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Peacock

It’s not the most practical lens but it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad to be able to use the older lenses in my dad’s collection. The flexible and super high ISOs of modern SLRs make the lens more useful now than it ever could have been with film.

Crafting, Family

Christmas!

Kelly

 

Christmas is practically a week-long event in our family, and this year was no exception. It’s our first Christmas in our new house, and we were very excited to get a tree.

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Our first stop of Christmasfest 2012 was a Christmas Eve dinner at RevolvingDork’s grandmother’s. She moved into an “active seniors” community last year and I think the ~20 of us overwhelmed some of the other residents. Bitmap, who has been in a much better mood the last few weeks, charmed everyone.

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She also stole the spoon from the dining room. Bitmap is really into spoons lately. It’s been great – we went out to dinner and she entertained herself the entire time with a spoon and a couple packets of sweet ‘n’ low.

We went to mass at 8pm, and although Bitmap was in a good mood she was LOUD so we spent most of the service in what RD calls the “baby penalty box.” It’s a plexiglass-walled room off to the side with the audio from mass piped in. It had an attached bathroom with changing table. It’s like the Catholic church is used to babies or something.

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Christmas morning was pretty exciting, we got Bitmap two toys and some clothes. She was mostly excited just to rip the paper off the packages.

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She also got some baby rice crackers in her stocking.

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She’s not really sure how she feels about them, but she ate the whole thing.

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After breakfast we went to RD’s parents’ for Round 2, and his other grandparents’ for Round 3. By the end of the day Bitmap had at least quadrupled her toy collection. Although to be fair she didn’t have more than a dozen or so toys to begin with.

I knit gifts for a few people each year, and this year my husband and in-laws got knit items. My father-in-law got a pair of handknit socks and a bottle of scotch.

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My own parents came up to visit the day after Christmas, and somehow I managed to not get any photos of their visit despite (or perhaps as a result of) getting a new camera body from my dad. It’s been a wonderful, exhausting week.

Family

Goodbye, Breastfeeding Mafia

Kelly

With Bitmap in daycare and me working out of the house, we’ve hit a new problem: breastmilk. I have a fantastic pump, and a comfortable place to do so at work, but it’s hard to keep up. If I don’t pump every hour it’s pretty much impossible to get enough for an entire day’s feedings, and that’s just not going to happen. Because at some point I have to actually work at work. So I wake up in the middle of the night to pump (in addition to waking up in the middle of the night to feed her). As such, I’ve become a little nutso about pumped milk. And it’s not good to be literally crying over spilled milk.

I feel like a bit of a failure because I could conceivably pump more, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to strategize my evenings around pumping. I’m sick of having to skip wine at dinner because we didn’t have any expressed milk handy to bring with us.

So we’re introducing formula. With a heavy heart I mixed up a bottle of half formula half breastmilk and gave it to Bitmap. She was a little confused at first, but gobbled it up nonetheless. And I started to wonder why I’d freaked out about this so much. It does, however, smell absolutely awful.

We’re not giving up breastfeeding entirely, but with her nursing less and me only pumping a few times a day I expect my supply will eventually taper off. And that’s ok. I do plan to continue using expressed milk to make her purees, since formula isn’t supposed to be frozen. I’m trying not to beat myself up about it, but I’ll admit it’s hard. My husband, on the other hand is thrilled. “Finally,” he declared, “I can feed her just as well as you can!”

I think we’re gonna make it after all.

Family

Daycare!

Kelly

Bitmap started daycare today! I’ll be working outside the home three days a week (in addition to my freelancing from home) so we had a bit of a scramble to find somewhere she could go. Most of the daycare centers in our area had a waiting list of at least 4 months! We got very lucky though, Olde City Day School opened up a new center near us, and since they just opened there wasn’t a huge wait.

Bitmap was a little apprehensive at first…

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I was more than a little flustered myself. Getting us both out the door at a reasonable hour in the morning was a new experience, and I managed to forget about half the things she needed. Thankfully they do a “transition” week where she’s just there for a few hours a day, so she won’t need most of the stuff I forgot until tomorrow. I’m sure the daycare staff are much too nice to gossip about what an airhead I was this morning.

The director of the daycare center helped her feel at home.
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Within a few minutes she was having a blast in an exersaucer.

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Then we moved over to the play mats.

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She was so excited by all the new toys she immediately forgot I existed. I said goodbye and gave her a kiss on the head, but she even didn’t look up. I could hear her shrieking in happiness as I left the center. I also caught a glimpse of her attempting to pull herself up to standing… using another baby for support. Yikes. Hopefully daycare will help her learn that other babies are not furniture. Aside from a few meet ups in our neighborhood, this is her first real interaction with other babies.

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It’s bittersweet, for sure, and I miss her already (it’s been an hour). But she was having so much fun when I left I was able to shake off some of the mommy guilt. Hopefully she continues to like it as much as she did this morning!

Cooking

Feuerzangenbowle!

Kelly

In college I had a German friend who made feuerzangenbowle every December, and now it just doesn’t feel like winter without it. Feuerzangenbowle literally translates to “fire tongs punch” and is a mulled wine made with flaming sugar.

The sugar cone is a specially made zuckerhut, available through German specialty food stores, and it’s soaked in Bacardi 151. Then it’s suspended over wine that has been warmed and spiced with cinnamon sticks, oranges, and cloves.

As the sugar cone melts, it drips boozy caramelized sugar into the wine. If it starts to go out too early, you can pour a little more 151 on using a metal ladle. For the love of god, do not pour directly from the bottle.

I also made some peppermint sugar cookies, the recipe for which can be found here. I learned something important though: when a recipe says “fun for the kids” it really means “this will be tedious so have an army of slaves to help you.” Drizzling the glaze and decorating each cookie with candy cane crumbles took forever, which explains why some of the cookies lack decoration.

We threw a party for the sole purpose of drinking feuerzangenbowle, and went through about 7 bottles of red wine in all. Plus 4 or 5 cases of beer. Apparently we have forgotten how to throw a “small” party.

Family

Fuck you, mommy guilt

Kelly

The internet is both wonderful and terrible all at once.

Thanks to the internet, I was able to learn about many birthing options I wouldn’t have otherwise. As a result, I had a really positive experience even in the face of some [comparatively minor but still serious] complications.

Thanks to the internet, I found a high chair that meets all of our needs without having to trek to a Big Box Store of Baby Crap.

Thanks to the internet, I don’t have to completely spaz out about the fact that I have lost the  doctor’s dosing instructions for baby tylenol (the packaging simply instructs me, unhelpfully, to consult a doctor).

And thanks to the internet, I have an incredible case of mommy guilt that is driving my whole family insane.

Let me tell you about all the horrible things I did this week. You may want to have a phone handy to call Child Protective Services.

– I fed Bitmap some jarred, conventional baby food. In fact, one of the foods I fed her had an additive (ascorbic acid).
– Later, when making up some sweet potatoes for her, I nuked them in the microwave instead of baking them.
– Speaking of food, at 6 months old Bitmap has been eating purees for over a month now.
– We let her watch TV with us. Also, we own TVs.
– We let her hang out in her bouncer saucer thing, because she loves the hell out of it.
– She sleeps in her own room, by herself. Sometimes when she cries we wait to see if she’ll settle herself first. Because we’re fucking exhausted.
– One night I forgot to turn the baby monitor back on after her 3am feeding, so I’m not sure how long she was crying before I finally woke up for her 5am feeding.
– Due to a miscommunication between my mom and myself, she was sent to bed without a bottle last night. She woke up at 3am ravenous. So basically it was exactly like every other night.

Obviously, these are not things that I objectively think are wrong. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling incredibly guilty about them. We stocked up on jarred baby food today, because it doesn’t go bad any time soon and it’s convenient to have around. And the whole time I felt awful, like every jar I put in the cart was some admission of defeat that I was not going to make the puree from scratch. And every puree I feed her, home made or not, is an attempt to shirk my responsibilities as Bitmap’s own personal dairy cow.

I worry about a long list of stupid things, all of which are clear indicators of my failure as a parent. It’s exhausting and I’m tired of it. And I’m tired of everyone who condemns people who make different parenting choices than they did, or acts like whatever granola hippie shit they’re into makes them magically a better parent and a wonderful person. But mostly I’m tired of the guilt that comes from somewhere entirely internal. I’m sick of feeling like I’m fucking it up every. single. day.

So fuck you, parenting guilt.