What's normal? What's a routine?

I have fond memories of the days when we had a great routine going. There were very few days when I had to yell at everyone multiple times to "get to the car NOW or you're going to miss the bus," I didn't have to hunt down backpacks and coats because they were always where they belonged and I cooked dinner--and special treats--on a regular basis. After the kids went to school I came home and did the daily chores because I had specific chores that I did on specific days. Sure, there were sometimes dishes in the sink and sometimes a basket of laundry I let wait until after the kids went to bed and I could watch TV uninterrupted while I folded it, but things generally ran smoothly. The house was clean. I loved it. Now? I always feel rushed in the mornings. The house is in desperate need of a thorough cleaning--I'm talking everything down to walls washed and woodwork scrubbed--and I have no idea when or if that's going to happen. It embarrasses me to admit that I can't remember the last time the bathroom was thoroughly cleaned. I clean up messes as they happen and the toilet does get cleaned once a week or so, but scrubbing the tile in the shower? Washing the shower curtain? Washing the blinds? Distant memories. For dinner I manage to cook maybe a third of the time. The rest of the time it's pasta, PBJ or fast food.

There are several reasons our routine is so nearly nonexistent these days. This, obviously, is the biggest one, both before and after her birth. Moving to a new house and having to redo all the systems I had in place at the old house is definitely a close second.

The last time we had the routine really down was before we moved. Yes, I know that was almost two years ago. Most of the pressing projects in that house, or what I considered pressing projects, were done. The remodeling was complete, the decorating was basically in place, all that had to be done was maintenance. Here, however, a lot of the organization never got redone for this house, plus there are a million projects that need attention. Because I'm impatient I think they need that attention right this second. Of course this always backfires on me; the more projects I plan, the more I just want to sit in bed with Baby Girl eating and reading blogs all day. Focusing on one room is only marginally helpful--I've been trying to get the living room refresh done for a while now and I am getting stuff done, but I don't know if I'm getting it done any faster than if I just did whatever I wanted to do at that point.

Decorating, though, is not where my attention should be directed. The routines for getting out of the house, getting homework done, cleaning, cooking and going to bed are really where things are worst. That's what I need to be trying to fix right now.

I've started by laying out the boys' clothes for the morning and signing Yaya's planner at night instead of in the morning ten seconds before he's supposed to walk to the bus stop. As for the cooking and cleaning, I have faith that at some point Baby Girl will let me put her down for more than five minutes. Until then, I bought some fabric to make a baby carrying wrap. I bought a giant picture frame at the thrift store months ago to make a whiteboard for my sewing room, but I think it'll be coming upstairs this weekend to keep track of school stuff. I might have B move the microwave cart to the other side of the kitchen so I can make a more easily accessible control center for all of the stuff that needs to be tracked around here.

Tonight, though, I'll be watching Crossing Jordan on Netflix since Baby Girl wakes up if I so much as think about moving. Hopefully my butt doesn't leave a permanent imprint in the couch.

Time flies and I don't like it

Today Baby Girl is one month old. It went by too fast; I don't even want to think about how fast the rest of her childhood is going to go. No one tell me she's going to be a teenager before I know it. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear that about any of my kids, as a matter of fact.

I thought I'd do a quick look back at how she's grown. I'm going to do once a month pictures a la Young House Love and Making it Lovely, but for now I just have pictures of her in her carseat. For reference, look at the warning tag next to her head.

Here I believe she's four days old.


Sorry for the quality on this one, it's a cell phone pic. She's twelve days old here. Fun fact, this is her first "big girl" outfit.


And finally, this is from today. I left out the pictures where she was obviously annoyed at me for putting her down.


That's the outfit she wore home from the hospital. It's a newborn, and sadly I think it's safe to say that she's outgrown it.

A love/hate day

Today was B's first school day of the semester. As the title says, his school days--especially the first day--are love/hate days for me. I love that he's going to school, as that will eventually mean a better job and more money for us. I hate that he's not at home to help me with the kids, although they were more or less decent today.

Baby Girl helped me make dinner.


Mr. Man kept himself busy watching cartoons.


Yaya was building an armory in the basement, but this picture is him trying to cover the lens. I was trying to capture the face he made when I told him he hadn't done a good enough job sweeping the entryway and had to redo it, which did not please him.


Overall it wasn't a bad day. The kids are more or less in bed now, by which I mean I'm holding a sleeping Baby Girl, Yaya is sleeping and Mr. Man is getting up every few minutes. I think I can bluff that I'm able to punish him (I can't lift him to put him back in bed so let's hope he doesn't call me on it) until B gets home in 45 minutes or so. I'm still not looking forward to when all of his classes have started and he's gone three nights a week.

Organizing while the baby naps

I used to have a much longer attention span. As a child I could sit in one place and read for an entire day. Before I had children I could start a project--sewing, painting, whatever--and finish it in one sitting. That hasn't happened for a long time. I guess my brain got so used to being interrupted that it felt it best to shorten my attention span proportionately. So now I can sit and do something for approximately 3.7 minutes before I get itchy and want to go do something else. Now that I have a newborn, getting involved in a long project is even less likely to happen. (Babies are so demanding. Why don't they pull themselves up by the bootstraps and learn to do things for themselves?) Good thing for me that these organization projects were all short enough to do while Baby Girl was taking a nap and in one attention span cycle.

First up, a cupboard organized while I made dinner last night. We are lazy people. Combine that with a lower cupboard with lots of big stuff in it and pans that have ended up in haphazard stacks and you get this.


Not the piles of papers and random junk (although I will deal with that soon), the stack of pans. Yes, why bend down to put stuff away (more like sit on the floor and pull out half the stuff in the cupboard if you're really going to do it right) when you can just pile it on the counter? My brilliant plan was simply to put the pans in the upper cupboard. Which, of course, looked like this:


My favorite thing that doesn't belong is the sticker paper.

By the time my tuna casserole was ready to go into the oven, I had it looking like this:




Looks like we need more snacks. Now I'll just have to convince Yaya to put the pans where they belong--we're still arguing over the new location of the Tupperware and I moved that at least three months ago. Oh, and the pizza pans had to stay in the lower cabinet, but now that there's an empty shelf in there they're easy to shove in without really looking.

Today we bought a new silverware organizer. It took approximately a minute and a half for the drawer to go from this:


To this:


I have been dealing with this mess by my side of the bed since we moved in. And yes, that is our boxspring just sitting on the floor. I thought our old bed was too big for the room and my mom wanted to take it for her guest room, so she was going to buy us a frame. We haven't gotten it done in the past year and a half. It's on the to do list.


I used a vaguely misremembered post from Young House Love to come up with this method of placing the screws. Hold scrap paper up to the back of the six strip, color over the mounting holes, tape paper to wall, poke screws through paper to mark wall. Easy peasy.


I ended up with this:


Ignore where I need to touch up paint. And my unmade bed.

These are my favorite kind of organizing projects. Someday soon I need to do one of my least favorite kind, which is closets. All of them (except the boys' closet, which I just organized a few months ago) are due to be emptied and reorganized. Definitely not a project that can be completed during one Baby Girl nap.

The birth of Baby Girl

Warning: this post will contain pregnancy and labor talk and pictures of my C-section. I won't post the bloodiest ones, but a C-section is still a medical procedure and you may not want to look at it. It's OK, I didn't want to experience it either.

My pregnancy with Baby Girl was very different from my pregnancies with the boys. Both of the boys' pregnancies were very similar to each other: I was in and out of the ER and hospital with preterm labor several times with both, and on bedrest from roughly the fifth month on with both. Both labors were very quick after my water was broken (done by the doctor with both boys). In fact, Mr. Man came approximately ten minutes after my water broke. So you understand why I spent most of this pregnancy worrying about precipitous labor, not to mention obsessing over every twinge and every Braxton-Hicks contraction (and those started early).

My pregnancy with Baby Girl was very different than my first two pregnancies (hello morning sickness for all three trimesters), and that left me unsure of what to expect for labor. I joked with my OB that I'd either give birth in the bathtub or it would take forever. As it turned out, it definitely wasn't the former but it wasn't exactly the latter.

My water broke naturally, at home, on February 11. B was out helping a friend move and I was home with the boys. I was walking down the hall, felt a gush and froze. I knew immediately it was my water; I've heard some people say they thought they were wetting themselves but that was definitely not my experience.

After I held my breath for a minute to make sure the baby wasn't coming right that second, I went into the bathroom to wait for B to get home. Luckily he walked in about two minutes later and immediately wanted to go to the hospital. I wanted to wait since I had had zero contractions, but he won out and we called my mom to come stay with the boys.

I was dilated to four and 75% effaced at my 32 week checkup. When we got to the hospital I was dilated to almost six and I think they said 90% effaced. We got to the hospital around 6:30 PM; everyone was expecting a baby by midnight. She, of course, had other ideas.

B and I took laps around the maternity ward off and on for a few hours, taking breaks for Baby Girl to be monitored. Contractions started at some point after we got to the hospital, but they weren't any worse than the ones I'd been having for weeks. I got into the tub for a while and tried to relax to trick the contractions into coming. I bounced and rocked on the birth ball. Every once in a while there was a contraction I needed to breathe and hum through, but most of the time it wasn't necessary. The contractions didn't get stronger, didn't regulate and didn't get closer together. We gave up and went to bed.

The next day we repeated our laps in the hallway but the contractions, when they were there, were still weak. If anything, walking around made them better. As soon as we woke up B and I started to contemplate the dreaded P word: Pitocin. I'd read all the horror stories about Pitocin-induced labors. The contractions get really bad really fast, the nurses crank the Pitocin unnecessarily, if you have Pitocin you're more likely to request an epidural because of the pain, etc. It all amounted to your birth experience being out of your control, an idea I hated. We wanted to avoid if at all possible, yet at this point I was still dilated to six and my water had been broken for over twelve hours. I knew that doctors don't like women to labor with broken water for more than 24 hours. (I later found out that my doctor prefers 18 hours but was willing to let me go 24; I don't know if 18 hours is industry standard now or what.) I was also put on antibiotics as soon as I got to the hospital to help stave off any impending infections. Probably a good thing given that I've always had lots of infections during pregnancy.

Around 1 PM B and I decided it was time for the Pitocin. While one nurse was talking to me and answering all my questions about the Pitocin the other nurse was on the phone with my doctor, who felt we couldn't wait too much longer and wanted me to start Pitocin at 2 PM. I was started on the lowest dose around 1:30. No contractions. An hour later the dose was doubled, then doubled again an hour after that. I think around the third doubling was when contractions finally started, but once again they were weak. They got slightly worse--I was breathing and humming through all of them--around 5 PM, but I was only barely dilated to seven. Given that this was my third child, dilating one centimeter every twelve hours was unexpected, to say the least.

The most painful part of the natural portion of my labor was when they inserted an intra-uterine pressure catheter to measure how effective my contractions were. They were registering on the external monitor, but they barely registered at all on the IUPC. That was when the C word started being mentioned as a real possibility. Up until that point I hadn't really considered it. Why would I need a C-section? This was my third child, I had had two natural and fast labors and, although I'd been told to take it easy just in case I had no risk factors this pregnancy. No ER visits, no preterm labor, nothing. The odds that I'd need a C-section seemed so low as to be negligible.

At 6:30 PM I was still dilated to seven and we made the decision that it was time for a C-section. My water had been broken for over 26 hours at this point, nothing was happening and it didn't seem that any labor breakthrough was imminent.

The prep for the surgery was different than I expected. I walked into the operating room on my own, for instance, and B wasn't there at first. I guess they wait to bring the father/support person in until things are all set. They didn't bring him in until after the doctor had made the first incision; I felt bad for him for having to see that until he told me later he wished he could have watched the whole thing.

I think the spinal block was the part that had me most afraid. Needles in your spine equals scariness. But the anesthesiologist was great. He explained every step of what he was doing and told me what to expect ("OK, now you'll feel warmth rushing down your legs" was the one that stuck with me most). Since I hadn't really been in pain I didn't particularly feel any relief when I got the spinal block.

Baby Girl was born at 7:44 PM on February 12. After the surgery when it started to wear off my legs were tingling like they were falling asleep, but I couldn't move my legs to "wake them up," which was annoying. It was also kind of difficult to nurse Baby Girl effectively, but I did my best. She roomed in the entire time and I was up and around, catheter removed (yuck, although it didn't hurt) by 3 AM that night.

Enough text; on to the pictures. Here's B and the top half of my face.


That's my OB on the left. He did a great job with everything.


Gooey baby.


Mad baby.


She cleans up really well, doesn't she?

Mini baby photobomb

As promised in the last post, more pictures of Baby Girl (and a few pics of her brothers). I don't have a cute blog nickname for her yet, but I'm kind of liking Baby Girl.








Her birth did not go as planned--I ended up with a C-section--but I think it went pretty well anyway. We ended up with a baby, which is the most important thing. I'll write it up soon.

Our Valentine's Day gift

Well, technically she came two days before Valentine's Day.


But I think she still counts. More pictures later.