Smart Lady

Twenty minutes feels like an eternity when I'm flitting around the internet, but hey, depth over breadth.

You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle. And you are worthy of love and belonging.

via DesignMom

Currents

Is it fair to post Currents when there is no real consistent content in between? Also, remember the catalog called Current? Also, I wish people still spelled it catalogue.

Current TV show: Finally getting around to watching Parenthood. Why did it end in February? Anybody?

Current Food: Still getting meals from people who want to cook for us. Now that I am officially weaned from the pump (no real sense of loss there, let me tell ya), I need to get a grip on the rampage-style eating that has gone on in the last three months. I was trying to describe the hunger that hits when you're nursing/faux-nursing at a machine. It's kind of like the feeling of being at a party that you didn't wantto go to but you did anyway, but then you walk in the door and you want to leave IMMEDIATELY. It's urgent that way. Only it's way more fun than that, because you get to eat and you lose tons of weight at the same time, and you get a glimpse into life with a great metabolism. So. It's nothing like my party metaphor, it's just an awesome hall pass. It's more like growing up in a super conservative Christian environment and suddenly your youth pastor tells you that premarital sex is like, TOTALLY ALLOWED.

Current Movie: The Help. Don't watch it the day before you become a working mom. It will bring up all kinds of uncomfortable feelings and questions and you will just bawl your bloody eyes out.

Current Wishlist: Rest. Baby sleeps like one, but I can't seem to go all night without tossing, turning, fretting. It's ridiculous, and I know I'm just stressed out with all the transition in life, but how cruel to have a baby sleep 11 hours and only sleep six myself. I need REST.

Current Music: The Muppets on Pandora. I am not ashamed.

Current Book: Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman. Basically, it's the book version of that fabulous movie BABIES. The point? It all pretty much comes out in the cultural, societal wash. Do your best. Give hugs.

Current Worry: Oh, you know. Just hoping we fumble through the rest of our lives as parents.

Current Indulgence: Hopping back into Pinterest. It was sort of uninteresting when I first started because it was so lean, but now you could spend hours and hours and hours looking at all sorts of beauty. Yum.

Current Obsession: Same ol', same ol'...

Laughed out loud...

Source: witanddelight.tumblr.com via Allie on Pinterest

Dear Donut

Dear Donut,

First of all, let's clear one thing up. We didn't mean to name you after a sugary confection associated with negligent law enforcement officials. But when the insurance company spelled your name as Dunkin, well, some things can't be undone. It seems pretty harmless for now, this nickname, especially since my own actual name is enough to make even the people at TSA chuckle on the job. Please don't struggle with childhood obesity. I'll blame myself.

Last night I left you at home to have a visit with Anne Lamott. I can't figure out the chemistry behind it (mostly because chemistry...blech), but after a few hours away my body is physically achy, like I forgot to take some medicine or something. But it's just missing you. I really do put the mother in smother, don't I? Luckily you still don't know the difference. Anyway, Annie and I had a lovely visit, along with five hundred other fans, and she reminded all of us a few things I'd like to think are gospel truth. Listening to her was worth being achy, and that's saying a lot, Donut.

If it's not your problem, you probably don't have the solution, she told us. And how do we ever know what's really our problem? Pay attention to what's inside your own hula hoop, she said. I know I'm going to want to keep you in my hula hoop for as long as possible, and if I joined the Y again, we could probably fit inside it even longer. But maybe the most terrifying and important thing I heard last night was that my whole job is to help you want to leave me. ACHE. ACHE. ACHE. That's my job! ACHE! To push you out of my hula hoop and help you see when your own begins and ends.

Right now you are chewing on at least eight fingers at once, and it must be pretty delectable because you aren't messing around with it. Your onesie is unsnapped and halfway up your chubby, bottle-fed belly, and you have Don Draper hair. Tonight I'm going to sing you the song about all the donuts in the world (to the tune of Jesus Loves the Little Children), and since we have already established you are a jelly-filled donut, I'll tell you that's my favorite kind of donut.

I sure do love you, kid. Have I mentioned I love you?

Mom

PS- Forgot to tell you that we learned you are genius on Wednesday. Took you in for a hearing study at the U, the first of three hour-long appointments. They kicked us out of the fancy sound booth in fifteen minutes and told me you set a WORLD RECORD (for infant hearing studies at this particular sound booth). You aced that hearing test and they canceled all the other visits, because you literally did a three hour test in fifteen minutes. Keep it up, that's how we'll pay for college.

Eat this! Immediately!

In an effort to shake up our rut of a dinner menu (with the fabulous exception of all the delivered meals people are still sharing), I whipped up these spicy noodles last night...and with great success! Success is defined, in this case, by whether or not you eat the finished product straight out of the bowl. You should try them. Especially if you are desperate for springy food, or spring, in general. They taste sunny.

Sunny Noodle Bang Bang

Starring...

1 box whole wheat angel hair pasta

1 handful cilantro, chopped a lot or a little

10 mini sweet peppers, sliced extra thin (these usually come in a bag, Costco carries them)

1 large lime

1 English cucumber, chopped or julienned

2 squirts Sriracha sauce, give or take

soy sauce

fish sauce

honey

fresh ginger

fresh garlic

Boil your water, boil your noodles. Chop the peppers, cucumber, cilantro, ginger, and garlic, and sauté them in a bit of oil to get to know each other. Save the garlic for a few minutes so you don't burn him up. This would be even better if you work in some green onion and carrot. I was out! (By the way, I am really liking my autocorrect action today. Saute is now sauté!)

Whisk the lime's juice, four big glugs of soy sauce, one glug of fish sauce, a tablespoon of honey, and a squirt of Sriracha. Superb addition? Sesame oil or black sesame seeds. Mmm. Taste it and make sure you like what's happening. A much better place to learn about vinaigrette is at Chow.com.

Now dump your noodles into the sauce, and dump your happy vegetables on top. Toss it all together and add more Sriracha or soy sauce if it seems unfinished.

Eat ravenously while your husband/roommate/small child observes your appetite in wonder.

Inspired by Poppytalk

Major Bummer

So. I've got some bad news. And it's not bad news that really affects anybody else in the world, but it's a big deal around here. It's something that feels like a secret, like I should be ashamed to tell the world...even though it doesn't affect anybody else. But it's not shameful, it shouldn't be, and I am writing about it so that I can get in the habit of being comfortable with the reality that I'm facing.

I am not breastfeeding my baby anymore.

I could tell you about all the lactation consultants who tried to help (there were FOUR), the ENT visits, the email chains with our pediatrician, phone calls to my mom and all my surrogate mothers here in Seattle, and I could tell you about how many tears I've cried over the last seven weeks of trying.trying.trying.

But what I need to practice, more than giving my laundry list of defenses, is getting settled into the fact that I am the mom. I am the mom who gets to decide what's best for my baby. I am the mom who gets to set an example for her kid by zooming out to see the big picture, the long-term outlook. In the grand scheme, this baby can't get what he needs to thrive, and my body can't give it to him. In the grand scheme, I'm going to face a lot of scrutiny from other people who question my decisions as a mom. I expect I'll hear from a few axe-grinding breastfeeding advocates in the next year, and that's going to be hard.

Here's how I'm gonna respond.

I love my kiddo, and I'm doing everything I can to show him just how much. And God bless Enfamil.

Currents (AKA Maryann inspires me every month)

Current TV Show: The West Wing. We are halfwaythrough season 3, and let me tellyou, I have never felt so friggin' patriotic. I LOVE PRESIDENT BARTLET. Also, did anyone watch that NBC special a few years ago on the inner workings of the White House? It was a little like The West Wing,and I wish they would do another special because I just remember the part where Obama shows up at Five Guys and everyone just set aside politics and agreed that those burgers are phenomenal. I also loved how much that Axelrod guy was really hardcore, and now I see that he is just like the fictional character Leo McGarry, whom I adore.

Current Food: Let me tell you now: there are a lot of reasons that becoming a parent is miraculous and wonderful, but in the top tier is the FOOD. Nothing makes a girl feel more cared for and supported than a fridge full of coq au vin and Ben and Jerry's Schweddy Balls. And the fridge is full up of Schweddy Balls.

Current Movie: Last to the Crazy, Stupid, Love. party and I don't even care. It was darling and cemented (recemented?) my love for Steve Carell.

Current Wishlist: A lactation consultant who appears during midnight nursing crises.

Current Music: Over the Rhine, over and over and over (see: midnight nursing crises).

Current Book: I can't really read since I need both hands while I'm nursing, and literally the nursing happens 10 hours a day. But have I mentioned The West Wing? I'm also thinking lots about Operating Instructions, which is Anne Lamott's phenomenal story of motherhood and winging the first year of her son's life. I can relate...ohsomuch. Minus the single parent/addiction/cancer parts.

And thanks to Maryann, I'm going to let you take a detour down the road of Anne Lamott-love, from Traveling Mercies:

"... I remembered another woman at our church, very old, from the South, tiny and black, who dressed in these ersatz Coco Chanel outfits, polyester sweater sets, dacron pill-box hats...She was always cheerful until she turned 80 and started going blind. She had a great deal of religious faith and everyone assumed that she would adjust and find meaning in her loss, meaning and acceptance and then joy; and we all wanted this because, let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people bear up to the unbearable. When you can box things up nicely and see that a tiny miracle took place and that love once again turned out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness. But this woman would have none of it. She went into a deep depression, and eventually left the church. People kept taking communion to her, but she wouldn't be in our community anymore. It must have been too annoying for everyone to be secretly trying to manipulate her into being a better sport about being blind than she was capable of being. I always thought that was heroic of her, that it spoke of such integrity to refuse to pretend that you're doing well just to help other people deal with the reality of impossible loss."

Current Worry: That my sweet little baby will inherit my family's big fat history of mental illness, and that I'll be holding my breath for the rest of his life. Working on shelving this, because let's be real, stressing about going crazy will make a mama crazy.

Current Indulgence: Eating like a horse. Like my friend Lindsey says, "Eat a cupcake, LOSE A POUND! Eat another cupcake, LOSE TWO POUNDS!" Breastfeeding's upside (besides the mystical bond thing) is calorie burning.

Current Obsession: