Ambergontrail – Trying to get through life without dying of dysentery

Piper works hard for her money, she does. In fact, right now she’s busting her diaper napping for Mommy in her pack n play.

I thought I’d write a little update on our work situation here (haha, “our”), in case people were curious how it was going.

The day starts like this: I wake up at 5:45 every weekday morning. Piper, depending on the night’s sleep, is either awake and fussing or asleep. Depending on her attitude, I’ll either feed her (if she’s awake and fussing) and change/dress her then get dressed myself or I’ll get dressed and get her things together, THEN feed/change/dress Piper.  The point is to make the smallest and loudest member happy, thus ensuring we are all happy.

Paul, Piper and I are usually out the door at 6:45 or so, some days we run late some we are early. Lately Piper has been pooping while getting strapped into her seat, causing us to spend time unbuckling her and getting her changed (after a short battle as to who has to change her this time). Still, I’d much rather she do this before we’re out the door rather than doing it while she’s napping in the car or at work.

We get to work around 7-ish. This is where the day is kind of arranged for us depending on Piper. A lot of the time she will fall asleep in the car and stay asleep in her car seat from 7am-10am (thereabouts). Since this was so common, I bought this Boppy Noggin from Amazon to keep her from getting flat head. She’ll wake around 10ish and I’ll feed her and play with her a bit then set her in the pack n play with toys or place her on my lap to “help” me type.

If she doesn’t fall asleep in the morning, we will take a walk- either around the block or to Coffee Bean, because she needs that morning nap. When she resists the nap she is just cranky all day, and it will often lead to her not napping at all. The key is: Sleep begets sleep. Seriously. A well rested baby will sleep better at night.

At around 12/1 or so she starts getting a little sleepy again (as per usual, depending on when she fell asleep and woke), so I’ll put her in the carrier and take a walk to get lunch. Usually she’s ready to go back down for a nap and I can eat my lunch without her on my lap. She’ll take a one hour nap usually, and wake up hungry, so I’ll feed her and play with her a bit. By the time 3pm comes around, she’s ready to nap again and I’m ready to go home!

Throughout the day she’ll either have tummy time on the floor, or be playing with my co-workers, or just relaxing in her swing. She is rarely by herself and awake just laying on her back.

People have asked how I get any work done having a baby in the office. There are a few keys: 1.) Work when she naps. POWER work, just do whatever you can to get things done. 2.) Let everyone know when you’re going to feed the baby. This way they can answer your phone for you, and you don’t have to go running out nipples flapping in the breeze, an angry milk-covered baby still trying to get a bite.  3.) Don’t be ashamed to just sit and play with your baby, I sometimes wonder if my boss thinks I’m a bad mom because I put her in the swing for 20 minutes.

I absolutely get so much work done while she naps in the early morning. After that, it’s kind of hit or miss when she’s sleeping, so I just let things pile up and do it when she naps next.

So far it’s a great set-up, Piper gets to socialize, I get to earn money and keep my job, and I always have food nearby, thus making sure I don’t need to pump.

It’s worked out really well for us so far, I am SO happy.

I work in an office building with a variety of suites/stores. We have a Starbucks (which business park DOESN’T?), a Subway, a Weight Watchers, a Tanning Salon, Massage Place, cleaners, dance studio, crappy hair salon and four restaurants: A Counter Burger, Italian Place, Organic Pizza, and a cafe. This is all downstairs, the suites being upstairs.

In her up to now, short life, Piper has met: Anna Faris, Ed O’Neill (he’s friends with boxing great Boom Boom Mancini, who has an office here, they’ve been eating at the Italian place for eons), Tom Hanks, and as of yesterday: MATT DAMON. MATT FREAKING DAMON.

Matt Damon did more than say “Hi” to Piper. No, he AWWWed. AWW. Directed towards MY baby. AW, HIIIIII. To Piper. To my Piper. My Matt Damon. Er. My baby.

She is a lucky girl, this sweetheart.

At one month of age, Piper looked like this:

One Month

For size comparison:

I'm holding her with her Dodgers jersey!

She weighed 10 pounds, 7 1/4 ounces and was 20 3/4 inches long. 90% and 50%th percentiles for weight and height. Her head circumference was 37.2cm. This is a gain of one pound 2 1/4 ounces from her previous appointment at 2 weeks old. She grew 1/4 of an inch in those two weeks.

Here she is at two months:

We have better pics at home, promise.

At this appointment she weighed 12 pounds 9 ounces (an increase of two pounds 1 and 3/4 of an ounce) and was 22 inches long (an increase of 1 and1/4 of an inch). Still 90% and 50th% for weight and height. Her head circumference was 38cm.

Here she is at 3 months:

She's relaxing

For size comparison:

Hard to hold and take pictures

At this appointment she weighed 13 pounds 14 ounces (increase of 1 pound and 5 ounces) and was 23 1/4 inches long (an inch and 1/4 increase).  Her head circumference was 38.5cm.

It seems she hit a growth spurt between months 1 and 2. She is now in 6 month clothes, or 3-6 in some brands. We’ve tried her 3 month clothes and they have since been tossed into the “give to a friend” tub, poor things just wouldn’t zip or snap closed! Luckily, we got so much from my friend Tricia, now we can pass them on to someone else! Gotta love giving back.

The other day I did something stupid- I watched a c-section birth online. Before I watched that I watched a woman receive an epidural. Why? What is the matter with me?

Before I had Piper I watched a ton of birthing videos, but oddly not one c-section (it’s surgery, what’s to learn from it?) or epidural one. Of course, I ended up needing the pitocin which in turn, made me need an epidural. At the end of the time in labor/pushing, I needed a c-section. Damn, that was when I wished I had watched it, if only to know what would be happening to me.

Curiosity got the best of me last week, when I was on Babycenter checking out Piper’s milestones. “Birth Videos” popped up in their menu. Hm… Should I? I already HAD the procedure, how bad could it be?

It was bad. Watching the woman get the epidural made me dizzy all over again. It was like I was suffering alongside her, with the pain of the procedure still fresh in my mind. I literally started swaying in my seat, nausea bubbling up. When she leaned back, relief flooded her face, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Then, I turned on the c-section birth. Whooo boy am I glad I was the person getting it done and not watching it. It was ROUGH. They really just manhandle you to get the baby out (which IS important, the baby), but HOW do they pull a baby out of a small smiley face scar? Not too softly, my dears. Looking at that incision, I decided to check out my own scar, to see how it’s doing. Well, it’s not cute. It’s definitely darker and thicker on one side than the other, the side they tugged on harder to get her out. It’s only 3 months later, so it shouldn’t be faded, but yuck! Good thing I have this handy belly flap hanging over it (which you should know is a side effect of a c-section if you have a big belly) to disguise it.

So yeah, word to the wise: the experience is all the more frightening once you’ve gone through it- to see exactly WHAT your body did is mindblowing.

I felt like changing things up a bit, as I’m no longer bitter barren. Enjoy.

Which site do you like better? This one or that previous one?

I know the photos are few and far between on this blog, but I’m a talker!

I just had to post this picture of Piper wearing one of her new fancy bows my boss gave her today. Those are her go-to fingers to suck.

I could die

On this day last year, I had a good feeling about this cycle, my twelfth. I don’t know what it was, but this time, unlike previous months, along with the usual bitterness I felt a little bit of hope. I even allowed myself to think, “Maybe this time we’ll strike gold.”

Perhaps it was moving into a new place, this one unsullied by a year of fruitless attempts to conceive. The new place was larger, more of an open space and had no carpet to speak of. There was even a second bedroom for our hopeful future addition. Not only that, but the rooms were large! We could even fit TWO kids into the spare room!

So, it was with an exhausted, but light heart (moving takes a lot out of you) that I saw two lines on my OPK. I had just felt the usual ovulation pain, too, so I figured, “Why not?” and set to seducing my husband.

That night, we made a baby.

One year ago today, Piper was but a figment of my imagination. Two weeks later she was now ours.  So much has changed over the last year, good and the bad. This was definitely good.

Happy Anniversary, Egg.

Here is me at 15 weeks:

I was 15 weeks here

Yes, fifteen weeks and not really showing, just “puffy”.

Now, I am three weeks post partum here.

Three weeks postpartum!

Not bad from looking like this 4 weeks earlier!

Almost 40 weeks here.

Now that Piper is here, I walk every day (it puts her to sleep), sometimes even home from work, for more than an hour. Not only that, but I walk her during the day at lunch- but it’s in the Bjorn, which is harder and really strengthens my core because I have to keep my back straight.

I exclusively breast-feed and eat well, a less than before (I can’t help that part, really). Since I started breastfeeding, I’ve been incessantly thirsty, so I often had a jug of ice cold water nearby. Before getting pregnant I was an iced tea fiend, and now that what I eat still affects her, I stopped drinking it (same for the rare soda).

I feel really good about myself. My abs are stronger, my legs are stronger, and I am now at least 30 pounds less than my pre-pregnancy weight. Not too bad, eh?

Hello! Good to see you. It is incredibly kind of you to take the time out of your busy schedule (picking mites off of your family members’ tails) to continually send “questions” you think are hateful.

Let me address them and you:

A.) Hm, obese people shouldn’t breed. Luckily for you, I’m not obese. No, I’ve actually lost about a 25% of my body weight, so yeah… sorry you can’t hurt me with that. In fact… it just makes you look pretty stupid because you’re obviously going off the Weddingbee site and seeing something I wrote, and it makes you THINK that’s still a sore topic. If anything, I feel fantastic, and each “question” you ask just makes me look at my kickass body and think, “Hell yeah”. I guess if you think obese people shouldn’t breed, that goes for hillbilly cousins? If so, you’d better tell your mother that, because some rules musta’ been broken in your household (aka, the rock you crawled out from under).

B.) Regarding my daughter. Despite what you must have been taught, it’s not kind to speak cruelly about people’s children. That’s all I’m going to say because I’m not going to sully her name to talk about how you seem to think it’s okay. All I want to say is, “Go Fuck Yourself” because that’s a cowardly thing to do.

C.) Speaking of cowards, you must feel so good about yourself that you choose to HIDE on Formspring, instead of going somewhere (like THIS BLOG) I can track your IP address. Because I could, if you commented here. Instead, you choose to keep asking “questions” that will go unanswered. Why even waste the time, dipshit? You must have a lot of time on your hands, sitting around the house waiting for some person to pay some attention to you. After this, no more from me. It must be sad to be all alone, making yourself feel better by attempting (and failing) to bring people down. I sure am glad I’m not a loser who has no friends, no husband, no kids to love her.

D.) You must have been one of those bitter women on Weddingbee who applied and didn’t get accepted. I think it’s about time you got over it. That’s the only reason you keep mentioning Weddingbee, I assume.

E.) One more thing: talk all the shit you want, in the end you just waste your own time. It’s pretty funny, because I send all your questions to my friends and we LAUGH at how pathetic you are, hiding under the cover of Formspring. I guess you must miss High School, blacking out pictures of people who wouldn’t be your friend. It’s really sad, actually, how hard you try to make yourself feel better about being a worthless piece of crap. I know I’d feel bad if I wasn’t happily married, with wonderful friends, wonderful support from the weddingbee gals, and with a wonderful daughter- who I got by having SEX, ever hear of it? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

In the end, your questions will go unanswered, sent off to Spam-ville, with the rest of the unimaginative questions hateful assholes like you send to people you don’t even know. Luckily- I’m hot, I’m thin, and I have a great set of boobs. I’m perfectly happy with myself- and three months post-baby! If only you could be this happy. Enjoy wasting your time sending me hateful questions, you idiot. I’m done.

Yesterday I was looking through photos on our Mac, and came across a folder named “Piper Jane 11/24/09″. Since I hadn’t ever looked in that file, I decided to take a gander.

What I saw was hilarious. It was pictures of ME! And her, of course, but pictures of us pre-op and post-op. So, I am going to share them with you, because I couldn’t care less that I looked like crap, that my belly was gigantic or that my lips were so pale I want to go back in time to apply chapstick. Why? Because I was bringing a child into this world, I shouldn’t look like a peach after 25 hours in labor, right?

Here we go:

First, I was in bed, waiting for the go-ahead for the surgery. The yellow thing in my gown is the sticky thing for my heart rate.

I was in so much pain here- the pressure was almost readable on my face!

Next, check out my cool catheter bag. I swear, this is the first time I saw it, and what was in it. Sorry it’s so gross. It was all the crap that leaked out when they broke my water. How huge was my belly?

Can you see the intense focus on my face?

Here is Paul, in his Frankenstein scrubs. He was so big they had to mix and match from different sets. The only thing that fit him well were the booties.

Good thing you can't see the back- they didn't meet.

Ah, the famous “Into the OR, STAT!” photo.

My OB was at my back, holding my hand. That meant a lot.

This is when Piper was just being pulled out- beware, it’s a little gross.

I can't believe Paul saw this!

Next up is another “just out of the womb” picture. Paul said it took a bit for her to cry, and I am so glad I wasn’t coherent enough to have noticed that.

Look at her squall!

She’s getting the routine check up here. Wow, I birthed a baby. How surreal.

Her apgar was 9!

Paul was so glad he got to cut the cord. He had been thinking they wouldn’t let him because it was a surgery, not a normal vaginal delivery.

He almost cut the wrong side!

Here she is in all her pink glory

I'd be pissed too, it must have been cold!

In this picture, Paul is trying to rouse me awake, while holding Piper. How tiny does she look in his arms?

I love this picture, so much

Here’s Daddy! The scrubs are gradually falling off, since they wouldn’t reach.

See what I mean with his scrubs?

Woozy, drugged and tired. Yet, I still wanted to see my baby.

I looked crappish.

The first time I laid eyes on my baby (who took this picture? Thank you, whoever it was).

That big tube thing was shooting hot air into my cozy little sheet nest.

Finally, I got to hold my baby. Here I was looking into her face to see what she looked like up close. Perfect, just as I had thought.

I became a mom.

And last: cozy Piper.

I think this is a rerun of a shot, but oh well!