Betty Marie

Just a quick photo post of our newest addition.
We are so in love with our little Betty Marie!

Being weighed & measured - about 2 hrs old.

Sean's baby footprint "tattoo".

Sean & Betty, 2 hrs old.

1st carseat ride! On our way home for the first time - 12 hrs old.

Getting ready to leave the hospital.

14 hrs old, at home.

Ella meeting Betty for the first time - 2 days old .


Ella thinking about nursing Betty.

Ella loves her new baby!

Ella discovers that Betty can hold her finger.


Hanging out with Daddy. Look at all that hair!


Ella washing Betty's hair.

Washing "sticky-up horse" in Betty's bath.

Sisters (one week old).

Incubating

Well, it's two days after my due date and I'm still pregnant. Throughout this pregnancy I've felt physically quite well - remarkably well considering the complaints many women have while growing a new person. My pregnancy-induced mental/emotional malfunctions seem to have resolved, with things at Sean's office at a reasonably good place and the Piddies shop closed until further notice. I'm focusing most of my energy on getting ready for a new member of the family, and overall feeling calm and ready. Admittedly, I'd feel a lot more ready if my floors were clean, but negotiating the movements necessary for cleaning floors at this late, rotund stage may just be a little more than I'm able to do.

Knowing that once this baby makes his or her arrival Ella's life is going to be plunged into utter boring-itude, I've been taking advantage of each day I have with our current only child. We've been to the zoo, the park, have taken lots of walks, and have spent many an hour on the floor of her bedroom playing and reading stories. I hope it's enough to hold her over until I'm able to pull it together enough to be fun again.

It's already a well-known fact that I am planning on and have prepared extensively for an unmedicated, natural birth. (Please hold the root canal comparisons - they don't jive well for a woman married to a dentist anyway.) After our rather horrendous experience with Ella's birth and the disastrous side effects of the epidural which nearly caused me to have a c-section, I am confident that barring an emergency, the allure of an epidural will not prove too tempting this time. Between my midwife, doula, and Sean, I feel completely supported and am actually looking forward to this baby's birth with surprisingly calm focus. The aftermath of having a toddler and a newborn to care for simultaneously I am approaching with more of a fuzzy, how-in-the-hell-am-I-going-to-survive squint.

Gloom, Doom, and the rest of it

Ella’s been swearing away here for long enough, methinks. As anyone who has caught sight of me lately already knows, Sean and I are expecting Foetus #2 in February. That, along with other upheavals, has kept me from the blog, but I’m hoping to be back at least periodically throughout the rest of my pregnancy (no promises about how long Ella might be swearing away after that).

So, pregnancy. In some ways this pregnancy has been easier than my last, and in others it’s been much, much harder. Physically it’s been easier, because I know what to expect. I haven’t been so anxious about whether the baby will be healthy, or what horrendous chromosomal abnormality he or she may have, or having nightmares about the baby being born with unsurvivable defects as I was with Ella, because I frankly just don’t have time. To be honest, it’s probably a good thing childbirth is so incredibly painful, because if it weren’t, I probably couldn’t be bothered to stop what I’m doing long enough to *have the baby*.

The downside of this pregnancy is that I seem to be much less able to handle the seemingly boundless pressure to make sure Sean’s office, my business, and the household are all running effectively before this baby makes his or her arrival. Things are in a constant state of flux depending on which entity I can afford to pay close attention to in any particular week, and I realize now that I’ve been in denial for the last two months about just how bad I feel. Nearly constant anxiety, moments of panic, and entire days of feeling hopeless and sad finally came to a boiling point, mercifully on a day when I happened to have an appt with my midwife that Sean could attend. Poor Sean was taken aback by just how bad it’s been as I sat in the midwife's office and cried, since he’s seen all of this mostly manifest itself as irritability and short-temperedness and I’ve been able to keep the anxiety and despair mostly under wraps. My midwife was – and is – supportive and assured us that this is a perfectly normal reaction to so much stress during pregnancy, but also is concerned about it getting worse if I’m not able to offload some responsibility. Another major concern is the postpartum situation may be magnified if I’m going into the birth feeling like this.

SO, why am I posting this all over the Interweb? Why haven’t I already told any of you any of this? Why in the hell can’t I just ask for help, for Christ’s sake? Because on days when I feel relatively sane and okay, the last thing I want to do is talk about how bad I really feel. I know it will lead to a breakdown each and every time I try to explain it, and the thought of doing that over and over is just too much for me to bear. My rational self realizes the folly in that reasoning, and knows that nobody can help or support me if they don’t even know what’s going on (Sean included). Unfortunately my rational self is simply not in charge right now. I hope everyone I love can understand that, and understand that I don’t think I’m really in a position to ask for help. Despite how ridiculous it sounds, having to ask for help – just thinking about WHAT I would ask someone to do – compounds the anxiety.

Having said all of that, please be assured that I’m not ready to hurl myself from a cliff. I’m doing what I think my rational self would consider the smart thing – admitting that I’m really struggling. If I don’t return phone calls, it’s not because you’re not important to me. It’s more likely because I’m having a bad day and the very thought of trying to sound normal on the phone is crippling. Or it’s because I’m up to my eyeballs in felt, fleece, or dental stuff and I’m busy putting out this or that fire.

The bottom line is that I know I will be fine, but I may need everyone to cut me a little slack while I try to survive the next few months with my sanity intact.

With gloom, doom, and the rest of it,

Dana

Sailor Ella

The hilarity just keeps on coming over here, so here's another snippets post, courtesy of Ella:

"Swear to God, slap my face again," said to her baby doll. (Go right ahead and put those Mother of the Year certificates in the mail...) My mom witnessed this one, and she told me Ella said it with the utmost tenderness and love, and was not in the least bit threatening. I think she maybe was trying to reassure me that Ella wasn't mimicking a horribly abusive mother.

"Sunabitch, my toe!" falling to the ground and holding her toe, mimicking what she had seen me do minutes earlier when she came running over to me and caught the top of my big toenail with the underside of her shoe and I was mortally wounded. She "sunabitch"'d one toe, then took off her other shoe and "sunabitch"'d the other. (Again, those certificates can be sent directly to me.)

Why I feel it's appropriate to post about my two-year-old's swearing sort of escapes me, especially since I'm the one she spends her days with and she's clearly not picking this up on PBS. For some reason I'm apparently totally willing to publicly implicate myself in all of this. For those of you who don't see Ella regularly, she really doesn't do this terribly often, but when she does it is so hilarious - mostly because she says these things in exactly the same way I do - that they're what I remember most and therefore what gets relayed to all of you. If you have children, I'm sure you'll understand how this sort of thing happens, and if you don't have children, why don't you just shut the hell up about my parenting skills?

I'll do my best to be a more civilized example, and in the meantime, I'll continue to share my slip-ups, courtesy of our little parrot Ella Mae.

Ella-isms

As a follow up to the last post, below are several of Ella's latest gems of wisdom. I was reminded to publish this post this evening, when Sean gave Ella a brand new toothbrush, complete with ladybugs, to hopefully help with the nightly toothbrushing battle. Ella's first order of business: brush her belly, poke herself in the eye (after I told her not to poke herself in the eye because it would probably hurt, apparently to make sure I was telling the truth), stick it in her buttcrack, and brush Maggie's teeth.

“It’s a nice sunny day!” She says this every time we’re outside in the sunshine.

“Yes, Mama!” Her standard reply whenever I call for her. It seems so grown-up coming from such a little person.

“I want to hold you,” said when she wants us to hold her.

“Good job, Daddy!” said to Sean when he finished mowing the lawn last weekend.

“Going to let him go back to his family,” said each and every time she lets a bug go. “Family” is pronounced, “fwamwy”.

“Thank you, Mama. That so nice.”

“I brushing my hair so pretty so we can go to the zoo. My friends will be so proud of me!” Said as she was brushing her hair on the morning we met our playgroup at, you guessed it, the zoo.

“OH! He’s so cute! I hold him *every* time,” said of a cute little squirrel at the zoo.

“I going outside for a couple of whiles.”

The other day Ella was playing with the side of the garbage bin in the kitchen, and when I asked her not to do it, she looked me and with a sigh of exasperation, said, “I do it all the time.”

After responding to Ella calling for me from the other room:
Ella: “Don’t yell at me.”
Me, a bit surprised: “I’m not yelling at you, honey.”
Ella: “You’re yelling at me for days.”

At the Asian market this week, I couldn’t find the rice noodles I was looking for, and Ella, seeing that I was a little bit frustrated, asked what was the matter. When I told her, she put her hands up, shook her head, and said, “Oh, damn!” Naturally there was a very nice couple right next to us, who will no doubt nominate me for Mother of the Year.

One night this week we were trying to get Ella to brush her teeth, a previously enjoyable task which has for some reason turned into a nightly throw-down. This week my tactic has been to sing songs about brushing, one of which has a line that repeats the phrase “tooth decay”. “I yike tootie cakes!” she declared at the end of the song. That obviously worked really well.

Ella

I thought it was time I dedicated a post to our littlest and cutest member of the family, who is growing at an alarming rate and somehow getting cuter and more exasperating every day. When Ella was an infant I can remember asking anyone who I thought might give me an answer, “When will this get easier?”, and more than one person told me that it never gets easier. As soon as you master one challenge, another unexpected one rears its head, and that continues all the way through adolescence and early adulthood. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they told me, you’ll find yourself sometime in the near future longing for those days of trying to comfort an inexplicably crying baby in the middle of the night in exchange for the completely unreasonable and illogical toddler who has taken that baby’s place.

That little pearl of wisdom is proving true for us. In some aspects, our days are so much easier now than when Ella was a baby. Now I can actually get a few things done during the day in those moments when she’s happily entertaining herself. She’s mobile and can communicate now, which is a definite improvement on constantly having to guess what was wrong, but as she becomes more independent, the fits become more baffling. One assumes that if an infant is crying, there is some tangible thing that they need and when they get whatever that is, they will be comforted. One should just throw that assumption right out the window with a toddler. There is often absolutely *nothing* wrong, but that is no reason not to throw an epic 45-minute screaming and kicking fit.

Despite the frustrations that come with living with a toddler, there are far more happy moments than sad, and more achievements than setbacks. Although she’s a total firecracker, Ella is incredibly polite, and she melts my heart every day with her cute little pleases and thank-you’s and no-thank-you’s and ‘scuse me’s. She’s also quite expressive, and squeezes her tiny arms around my neck at least once a day and says, “I love you, Mama.”


Our most exciting Ella news of late is that she is potty trained! WOOHOO! She's still using her little potty at home, but isn't opposed to using a regular toilet when we're out and about. We've taken several trips away from home with her in underpants, including an entire morning at the zoo, and I'm so proud to say she hasn't had a single accident and is great about telling me when she needs to go. Her only slips in the past couple of weeks have been at home when we're outside, but that seems to have passed. (Thank goodness, because I was definitely not cool with her dropping trou in the middle of the driveway to pee...) Although she still wears a diaper at night and at naptime, they are almost always dry when she wakes up. It was a bittersweet moment putting her diaper changing pad in storage in the basement. I so clearly remember when she was so tiny she could practically swim on that changing pad, and now she doesn't even need it anymore.

Ella has an insatiable thirst for learning, and I’m constantly amazed at how quickly she’s picking up letters. She knows at least 10 letters now, and is starting to learn their sounds. “F says ‘fuh, fuh, fuh’,” she’ll say. Perhaps the most surprising part is that I really haven’t been trying to teach her letters because I assumed she might be a little young for that. But she picked up “W” on Sesame Street one day, and the floodgates opened. She started pointing out every “W” she saw, on street signs, in books, and on TV. When I realized she was interested, I started to point out other letters, and she has picked them up incredibly quickly. Now she’s even making out letters in her own scribbles and paintbrush strokes and delighting in her seemingly magical ability to “make letters”. I do hope this is a precursor to a life-long love of reading and learning, and that she keeps that thirst for knowledge.

Thanks in large part to Wah Wah Jill, Ella absolutely loves pretending, and wants every inanimate object she comes across to “talk”. When playing blocks, she’ll pick up one block, declare it the mommy, and get a smaller block to be the baby. “I want them to talk,” she’ll say, directing me to play the part of the baby block. She loves bugs, flowers, and birds, and wants to know the name of each new one she sees. Surprisingly, she actually remembers the names, and rather than calling a bird, “bird”, she calls it a robin or a sparrow or a dove or an owl, and so on. She knows the names of all of the bugs we see regularly, and names each flower in our yard.


I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be with Ella each day and to share in her little victories and discoveries. My adventures in motherhood thus far have taught me that although there will always be challenges in parenting, it is so important to appreciate the time we have with our little people in the present. It’s impossible not to think about how much better it will be when they sleep through the night, or are finally potty trained, or whatever the challenge of the day happens to be, but I am trying my best to be aware of the treasure that is Ella’s childhood while she’s still a child, rather than wishing it away in hopes of easier times. I hope I will look back at this entry someday when an impossible teenager has replaced our precocious toddler and we’re longing for the days of two-year-old hissy fits about nothing, and remember those soft little arms around my neck and that adorable small voice telling me she loves me.


The gorgeous photos in this post are courtesy of Kelly Bennett, one of the most talented women I've known. Our experience with her was magical and I couldn't recommend her more highly. You can find her and more of her work at www.kellybennettphotography.com.

Fence

Sean and I spent the entire weekend either actively building the fence or going to the hardware store for the seventeenth thing we forgot to get the last time we were there. The adventure started Thursday, with a trip to Sutherland's Lumber while Ella was at Sage’s house playing with Annica (thanks, Sage!!). Apparently I am not capable of counting higher than 21, because we were six 2x4’s shy of what we needed. We picked those up at Lowes, but good lord, we had to look at every single board they had to find six that were relatively straight and not split or otherwise wrecked.

Just as we were getting ready to dig postholes Thursday afternoon and while I was at Ace Hardware buying screws (which we had of course forgotten at Lowes), Maggie went right ahead and had a seizure. We rushed her to the vet, and there went the rest of Thursday. Incidentally, Maggie seems to be fine and we’re not going to worry too much unless she has another one.

Friday was posthole diggin’ day, and we went right to work in the morning. Our neighbor, Janessa, was sweet enough to take Ella to the park for a couple of hours to allow us to get a jump on things. We thought it best to do the major sawing while Ella was gone, so we used the table saw to rip our 2x4’s into 1x4’s (a huge cost-saving measure, as redwood 1x4s are even more expensive that 2x4s), then began to dig our postholes. Ella came home from the park in one of those moods, and we got very little done the rest of the afternoon. All we were able to manage was bracing the posts on the north side before calling it a day.

Ella sacked out in the lawn chair after
a hard day of being completely impossible.

Saturday morning we hit it early to pour concrete in the postholes. Just as we were ready to mix concrete, we realized that we were short, oh, about a thousand pounds. Literally. One. Thousand. Pounds. Attach trailer to car and go back to Lowes. Again. Bring trailer home a thousand pounds heavier, and proceed with concrete mixing. (Thank goodness for that trailer.)

Cue Ella to completely FREAK OUT. She must have sensed we needed to get something accomplished because she was whining and crying and yelling, “Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!! MAAAAMMMAAAAAA!” all day long. Despite heavy protests, I forced the nap issue and although she didn’t sleep for long at all, she woke up much happier. We got all our posts set and stained all the ones on the north side.

Fence posts set on the north side of the yard.

Sean stayed out until dark mixing and pouring concrete into the postholes on the west side while Ella and I scrubbed the backyard off of ourselves and walked over to the great new Thai place on the corner for takeout.

Sean finishing up after a marathon post-setting
session on the west side of the yard.

My plan was to stain the posts on the west side of the yard early Sunday morning, because the weather forecast called for afternoon thundershowers. It was pouring rain when I woke up at 7:00 and didn’t stop for the rest of the day, so we stayed in and I made apple-cinnamon pancakes for our big Sunday breakfast. If you’d like to give them a try, just add one grated apple and 1 tsp cinnamon to your usual pancake recipe, and also use brown sugar instead of white sugar. After a couple of grocery runs, we spent most of the day drinking frozen cocktails, sewing, and cleaning the house.

Ella stomping in puddles in the rain with
her fun ladybug umbrella from Grandma Janet.

Late Sunday afternoon after the rain had subsided a bit, we tried to figure out what in the Sam-hell we were going to do to hang the 2x4’s between our posts. We first had to devise a clamping/bracing system, after nearly killing each other trying to drill pilot holes for our toe-nailed screws at wonky angles with nothing but a profanity-laden prayer holding the boards in place. This situation is a sure-fire recipe for a divorce. I saved our marriage and worked out a system by clamping a scrap piece of 2x4 behind the 4x4 posts and clamping our 2x4 rail to that. It held the board perfectly flush with the back of our posts and left our hands free to drill pilot holes and drive screws. By the time we figured all of this out, and between Ella having total meltdowns, we had exactly ONE 2x4 rail hung when our only 7/64” drill bit, which was far too short anyway, snapped in half. Cue Dana’s total freak out.

2x4 rail hung on 4x4 post, using toenailed screws
so hardware won't show on opposite side. Bamboo
panels are hung on this face of the 2x4 rail, then
sandwiched between this 2x4 and a 1x4 on the
facing side.

Finally, we arrived at Monday morning and I calmly informed Sean that if we didn’t have bamboo hung on the north side by the end of the day, I was moving. We started the day, as all our others, at Lowes buying more drill bits and two more 2x4’s, because I still can’t count. After hanging three 2x4 rails across the bottom of our fence, I arrived at the unfortunate conclusion that our yard slopes even more than I thought it did and had to remove all the rails and reposition them. After hanging three more rails across the top of the fence, I came to the equally unfortunate conclusion that due to the slope of the yard, the top of the 4x4 corner post, which is attached to our neighbor’s fence, was about 4 inches too short. We now have a new post on that corner, and were only set back an hour.

Ella having a great time going back and forth
to "Fritz's yard" through the peeled-back
chainlink fence on the south side of
our yard. Fritz is our neighbor's dog.

Before we could hang the bamboo panels, all of the 2x4 rails had to be stained, as did the posts on the west side of the yard so we can hang the rails on that side in the next few days. I hung the bamboo panels using my awesome nail gun (thanks, Sean!) before calling it quits to grill a much-deserved steak for Sean and portabella for me. It took seemingly forever to get to this point, but my goodness, is it ever gorgeous. It’s turning out even more beautiful than I had imagined. The backyard I’ve been dreaming about for the last 5 years is finally materializing.

Staining the top 2x4 rails before hanging
the bamboo panels.

First bamboo panel hung! This photo is taken
from our side of the fence, and the 1x4 facing
at the top & bottom of the panel is not yet attached.

Fence as seen from our neighbors' yard
(north side). Posts will be cut flush with the
top rails and a 2x6 cap will cover the top of the
fence, but otherwise this side looks nearly complete.

A closer look at the fence from Dennis & Richard's side.