This was Kurt’s first week back to work. Monday went pretty well for me. I got a reasonable about of sleep Sunday night so I was able to give her a bath and managed to get a shower for myself before heading off to our second “living with baby” group date. The group is, well, it gets me out of the house. The facilitator/teacher/whatever of the group is annoyingly sappy. There are lots of hands outs for the group and she doles out a lot of information, which is great, but the nursery rhymes…I just don’t do the gooey baby talk stuff with silly songs. Sophia is just going to have to settle for her dad singing show tunes to her. No, he’s not gay and now (after eight and a half years) I have living proof (yes, Sophia is really his kid)!
On Sunday, I went grocery shopping all by myself. That was the first time I spent anytime away from Sophia. It was great. I love you Sophia but I needed a break from your screaming and by the way, you’re destroying my boobs. Not that I mind going from a large “A” / small “B” cup to a definite “D” but the red stretch marks emitting from the areolae caused by that growth make my boobs look like large eyeball props for a Visine commercial. And my nipples hurt from your milk extraction process. The length of time it takes for you to extract milk is annoyingly long as well, but I digress.
I spent an hour and a half buying groceries for the week and on Monday, I tried out a new recipe for stew. I’m throwing that recipe out. It sucked, but we had some leftover apple crumb cobbler from Sunday night. This isn’t just any old cobbler. This stuff is so sweet I imagine a child’s reaction to it would be similar to that of a cat that has had pot smoke blown into it’s face. I’ve never done that myself, I’ve just heard stories. No, I’m not going to be a puss and say I’ve never inhaled (Sophia don’t do drugs). I just never shared it with a cat. I digress again.
Monday night after dinner Kurt and I are sitting on the couch with our crumb cobbler and tiny baby Sophia is in between us propped up with her Boppy pillow. Kurt thought her so cute at that moment that he was compelled to share a taste of cobbler with our spawn. He swiped a bit of the filling from his plate onto his finger and rubber her gums with it. I freaked, “Don’t do that!” He got mad at me thinking I was merely opposed to the copious amounts of evil synthetic high fructose corn syrup that must be in this stuff, “Oh give me a break!” I’ve been trying to fight the uphill battle of eliminating the high fructose corn syrup from things in our kitchen that shouldn’t contain it at all like ketchup and bread (read the ingredient list, it’s used as a preservative) and the stuff that is sweet enough without it like jams/jellys and pancake syrup (there is nothing natural about Mrs. Butterworth’s). I was successful in those ventures only, not so much with peanut butter, which I have promised him I have given up on. You make keep your beloved Jif extra crunchy peanut butter. *eye roll*
That night our baby Tasmanian devil AKA The Nipple Shredder kept me up till one in the morning and woke up three or four times during the night as opposed to her usual one to two times, and during one of the wakeup calls there was one instance of projectile vomit. It’s hard to say if that was actually vomit or if she just spit up A LOT and the force due to a simultaneous cough, but either way I blame the sugar! She also stayed up all morning and didn’t really crash until Kurt came home that evening. She wasn’t awake that whole time, but she didn’t sleep for more than an hour at any point during the day.
Kurt had given Sophia pure cane sugar on her tongue once before to cure hiccups, which actually did work. I didn’t mind that because it’s just one ingredient, and it didn’t have the effect that the cobbler seemed to induce. What really bothered be (prior to the projectile vomit) was that the cobbler consists of multiple ingredients and we have no idea what may upset her system (high fructose corn syrup). As I put it to Kurt coldly when he arrived home from work and asked me how my day went, “There is a reason babies first foods are strained peas!” Maybe I was too harsh on him but I feel somewhat justified since I’m the one that has the all day milk shift. I also didn’t really want to introduce her to sweets until much later, like age three or four. I want her to learn to eat healthy first, then she can start with the candy. This might be another uphill battle with Kurt. *sigh*
Wednesday Sophia was still way off her typical schedule, which annoyed me because I wanted to leave the house and run some errands during the day but couldn’t. When Kurt came home he asked how my day went. I simply said, “Your turn!” “That bad?” “YOUR TURN!”
Thursday Sophia was back to her regular schedule, but that was the day she decided to introduce me to the world of diaper blowouts. Three cheers for motherhood.
We can’t prove this, but we think that one of the reasons that our daughter is good with words is that we didn’t baby-talk with her. We sang classics, but as she got older, we played with the words — the wheels on the bus they all fall off, all fall off, all fall off — once she was old enough to realize that we weren’t singing exactly the same song every time. We did it just for the heck of it — also, because the basic song was getting so very old — but she liked it.
So I think your thoughts on that are exactly right.
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Okay, I’m not a parent but I can’t stand baby talk. Even when the words make sense, there are some people (seems like women mostly) who like to speak in a high pitch shriek that I swear dogs howl to. We actually had to change my little sister’s doctor because she couldn’t seem to grasp that the kid (now 11) could hold a conversation. And there’s only so much “and how is this wittle one doing today” a person can take.
Corn syrup…Ack! I could write a rant, but I think I’ll just jump up and down instead.