Baby names I didn't get to use

Insomnia post part II

Twin girls:
Ivy and Evie (short for Evelyn)

Twin boys:
Joseph (Joey) and Henry (Joey Ramone and Henry Rollins)

Intersex baby:
Casey Lee

boy:
Russell
Donny Lee

girl:

Shane Ellen

I have no names for twins with mismatched junk.  :(

Damn uterus

Diaper bags. Baby Mum-Mum crackers.  Gerber Puffs. Folding the front of the diaper down for the umbilical chord. The Moby wrap.
Oddly enough, I don't want them.  I truly think that even if I won the lottery and all my kids died, I wouldn't want to have a new baby.  I think I'm done.
I want a hysterectomy. 
I'll have to think on it  a while. My Mirena is still good for another 3 1/2 years so I have time. But if I'm done using my uterus, why deal with periods at all?

It's a vagina, not an identity

Finally, barrettes for baby girls with no hair. Because it would just be the mark of a HORRIBLE MOTHER to let your child be androgynous, or just to put girl clothes on her, I guess.  And no, jabbing spikes through her ears isn't an obvious enough sign of gender conformity so don't try pulling that "But I turned them and cleaned them 6 times a day and they got infected 3 times just so people would know she was a girl!" crap with me!
But I have the answer.  In case you want to know.  Do you want to know? It beats out gluing bows to your baby's head (yes, people actually do that), strapping satellite-dish sized polyester dahlias to her head, putting wigs on her, and even buying overpriced no-hair-needed barrettes. So if you want the super secret answer to all of your androgynous baby problems, here it is.

mom body

If I were to wake up tomorrow and be 19 years old again, with tight skin and everything up where it used to be, I would not be thrilled.  I'd like being skinny, but I would miss my stretch marks and chewed on parts.

They still can die, and they still probably wouldn't

Every single time you take your child in a car, they are traveling at high speeds on hard pavement in metal and plastic canisters of flammable liquids. That is a fact. It is also a fact that if you thought about the thousands of ways a child could die in an auto accident every time you got in the car, you'd never leave the house and probably have the kid taken by the state due to your emotional and mental issues over it. When people say "I could be hit by a bus tomorrow" they really mean "I know logically that I am mortal", not that they fully accept the gravity of the truth that they could be hit by a bus tomorrow, but they could. Why do I say this? Because people need to stop believing, and I mean this literally, that rules will make them immortal.

I know parents who are just anal about the rules. Never put a baby in a car seat in a coat, stay rear-facing as long as possible (ever known a mother to fold her kid's legs together to keep the car seat rear-facing longer? I have), never allow a baby to sleep on their tummy (I've heard of moms who rolled babies over who flipped on their own during the night), never let a baby have a blanket in the crib (why do sleep sacks come in toddler sizes?), never give a baby under x months old anything over stage 2 baby food. And what does all this boil down to? A belief that if they follow all the rules and never deviate, nothing can happen to their babies. And if something bad happens to someone else's baby, that person must have done something wrong. The car seat straps weren't tight enough, or there wasn't a fan in the baby's bedroom, or they are a cheerio before they were old enough. Every baby death must be avoidable because if not, then how can I be absolutely sure to avoid my baby's death?

You can't. You can minimize risk but never avoid it altogether. Last fall a kid at a school here in town was struck by lightning. The fiery hand of fucking God hit this kid in the parking lot of the elementary school. This is the textbook definition of random! And I heard parents rant about how the school had no lightning rod, and the kid had a skateboard, and my favorite: school should not have let out if there was a storm. Because what I want is for the school to hold the kids hostage until the rain stops, which often takes hours. But this accident must have been preventable and avoidable, or else we have no power. And if we have no power, then we are powerless, adrift on an ocean with our kids, unable to control the waves or the tides or the currents. And that just scares the fuck out of everyone. And rather than live with that reality, they hide behind their rules. And we all do it, to an extent. We all try to minimize risks (as we should), and we all somehow convince ourselves that a car cannot drive through the wall of our house and run over our children while they sleep, that organic food can never make us sick, and sometimes even that if we make our kids dress conservatively, they cannot be raped. But it leads to some harsh behavior too. Parents treating other parents like monsters and murderers for fastening the car seat straps over the coat rather than inside it (read that link, it's really good), or for giving a baby a blanket, or letting a toddler have m&ms (choking hazard, you know). But the fact is that we are all blood bags waiting to be popped, and nobody is running around with needles, poking their kids.

For the record, my 12 year old gets to ride in the front seat, my sons wear coats in the car seats, my babies have blankets, Danny gums table food, I absolutely love the BundleMe in the winter (and it's a death trap the likes of which will surely kill my child, another good link), and I consider myself to be a pretty good mom. But then, I also let my daughter ride her bike to the store by herself, so I'm obviously the most passive-aggressive murderer ever.

teething and daylight savings time

It's so much easier to take a screaming, cranky, over-tired baby and nurse him to sleep before he gets teeth. My maternal urge to take him to my breast and offer comfort has been tempered by an even stronger urge not to have my nipples sheared off. Ahhh, they grow so quickly.

Mommy Badges

I was inspired recently by another mommy to think of some "Mommy badges". Mommy badges are like Girl Scout badges. They commemorate milestones that every (or most) mommies go through. A good baby shower game would be for all of the guest mommies to make badges for the guest of honor, to let her know what she can look forward to. Here are some badges I've earned, and I encourage you to leave yours in the comment section.

1. the "Is there a baby in your tummy?" "No, I'm just fat" badge
2. the walked in on during sex badge
3. the loud in public "Who farted?!" badge
4. the puked on at the grocery store badge
5. the Oh my god what are you eating badge (could be a crumb from the floor, could be a cricket, you don't know)
6. the "I'm going to enjoy this moment of peace because when I go see what he's up to I'll blow my top" badge
7. the trip to the doctor because some non-food item has been swallowed badge (pennies, rocks, whatever)
8. the swearing toddler in public badge
9. the "Why aren't Barbie's boobs long like yours?" badge
10. the "I hate you" badge (every mother's version of an Eagle Scout badge)
    

Those poor babies

I have been told that I tend to over-think things. And it comes as an honest surprise to me that the rest of humanity just takes everything at face value and doesn't think about things any more than they have to. And that's sort of how I explain this current practice of sexualizing toddlers. Yep, you heard me.

I hate little girl bikinis. The whole point of choosing a bikini over a one piece is to show more skin, and then people put them on their little kids. What purpose is there (unless you're a pedophile or out shopping for a pedophile) for putting a 4 year old (or younger) in a revealing swimsuit?

Make up on little girls is almost as bad. I understand a little concealer if your kid bashed her face on the stairs the day before family pictures, but some people put their daughters in full war paint. Mascara, blush, lip gloss. Not only does it make the child look different from how she usually looks, which seems to be the opposite of why you'd take a photo of your child, but make up is generally accepted as making a woman look more attractive, sexually. Lip gloss makes lips look pouty and plump, mascara makes women look heavy-lidded (bedroom eyes), blush makes them look flushed. Why do mothers want their children to look heavy-lidded, flushed, and pouty-lipped?


And on another, non-sexualized, rant against children's fashions: What is with the giant satellite-dish flower headbands people put on their kids? A polyester daisy or dahlia that looks like it's been plucked from a Memorial Day grave arrangement, hot glued to an elastic and yarn headband. When my daughter was little, female babies were identified with ridiculous velcro barrettes. Now you have to staple gun a ridiculously disproportionate "silk" flower to them. And still people pierce their ears anyway so what's the point?

In response to a comment

I recently got a comment on one of my breast feeding posts that made me think. It was from a friend of mine, with whom I would like to stay friends, and it basically said that both she and her husband were formula fed and they're all right, and their daughter was formula fed and she's fine. (For the record, I don't doubt that any of them are fine.) And it said that breast feeding's not for everyone and that formula was good enough for her daughter. My first instinct was to reply with "Oh I totally get what you're saying and you're right," because that's how polite I am. But the fact is that I don't get it. And to stop short of saying she's not right, I don't happen to agree with all of her statements either.
Formula isn't, at its core, toxic. It can be, if the water it's mixed with is bad or if there's some problem in the manufacturing process, and those possibilities are part of my objections to it, but it is not toxic. A baby fed infant formula will turn out just fine. But, they will still not get everything that a baby fed breast milk gets. And I just cannot fathom how that is good enough for a baby. I understand if a parent doesn't realize the discrepancies, but not if they don't care. My mother was fed, exclusively, sweetened condensed milk. The kind that comes out of a can that you make fudge with. That's what she got in her bottles until she was old enough to be weaned onto whole milk, which was at about 9 months. It was the 40s and she was adopted, so that was what she got. And she grew. She lived and gained weight and met all of her milestones. So will a baby fed whole milk out of a gallon jug. But we don't feed whole milk, or even sweetened condensed milk, to babies because it is lacking in so much. What was good enough for my mother was NOT good enough for me, or for my kids. And I'm not sure, but I think it might actually be illegal to give a baby sweetened condensed milk.

Not everyone can breast feed. I freely admit that. But, while I know that it's a relatively common opinion, I cannot understand sexualizing my breasts to the point where I'd deprive my baby of their milk. There are a LOT of things that were good enough for me that aren't good enough for my kids, some because we know better now than they did back then. Smoking, going without a seat belt, carcinogenic sun burns, and baby formula. It's a parent's choice to make, but I just can't see making that choice. I don't propose that the choice be taken away from anyone; I just can't see going in that direction. And while my instinct will always be to apologize for offending and back down, my opinion won't change.

I just need to get it off my chest

I'm a mutterer. When I used to work at a factory, bosses would shovel shit at me all day, and I'd take it. Yes sir, no sir, whatever you say sir. But I'd mutter into the machine about it later. I am real good at talking back to people who aren't there. And I am currently on a message board where everyone is so supportive of each other and we all get along, and it's great. But it means a lot of muttering, on my part, to keep up the niceties. So I'm going to do my muttering here, now, because I simply can't keep it in any more.

Safety is great. Safety for children is the most important factor I take into consideration every day. But, like everything else, it has to be mitigated against real world considerations. Some parents "err on the side of caution" to the point that they become paranoid and over protective. Being a parent is scary stuff, especially when you consider just how many ways there are for a terrible thing to happen to a kid, and how many terrible things there are. And for those parents, following "rules" to the letter often helps them feel as if they can prevent terrible things. But at what cost? I've known parents who went months without sleep because no matter how many people told them to swaddle the baby, the books said never to put anything in the crib, and swaddling involved a potentially deadly blanket.

Parents wait months and months to let a baby have a single lump in his baby food, or a blanket in his crib, or any toy small enough to fit through a toilet paper roll. (Newsflash: a garden hose will fit through a toilet paper roll, and a garden hose is not a choking hazard.) Parents who wash toys in bleach on a weekly basis, or who refuse to let a child sit in a shopping cart without a preposterous looking flouncy cover, or who won't let a toddler use a public bathroom without bringing a toilet seat from home. I am not kidding; people carry toilet seats with them.

My point is that some people have to follow every rule ever laid out by anyone, out of a mistaken belief that as long as they do everything right all the time, no harm can ever come to their children. And frankly, it annoys me a little. Because then when I don't follow a rule I am recklessly putting my child in danger and therefor I am a bad mother. Here are examples, muttering as I am, that drive me nuts.

Did you know that everyone under 4'9" needs to be in a booster seat whenever they are in a vehicle? Sounds logical, right? Well, this is everyone under 4'9" regardless of age. Also, regardless of why they are under 4'9". So every adult with dwarfism should be, for their own safety, driving from atop a booster seat. But here's the thing: dwarfs often have average sized torsos - you know, the part of the body that the booster seat actually elevates - and are only short because of short limbs. But they are under 4'9" so they must be in a booster seat, preferably in the back seat away from air bags! There is no room for interpretation. I can only assume that means that a formerly 6'5" double amputee would need a booster seat as well, since people tend to lose height without their legs. Welcome home, Soldier, and thank you for your service and sacrifice. Here is your Evenflo Big Kid Booster Seat!

Car seat safety is of the utmost importance. That is why, no matter the temperature, car seat straps are never to be fastened over a coat. It seems that a coat, any coat, that comes between the straps and the baby will compress in an accident and leave space for the baby to fly out. I have no doubt that this is true. But when it is 20 below I am less inclined to fear a head on collision and more inclined to fear hypothermia or frost bite brought on by me standing there taking the baby's coat off with the car door open. Although I have been told that it is okay to merely unzip the coat and fasten the straps against the child's chest that way. Except that I have recently learned that car seat covers and BundleMes are unsafe because they come between the back of the car seat and the baby. So how on Earth is the back of the coat safe to be behind the baby? And if a thin cotton cover is unsafe, then a onesie must be a death trap. And diapers! Diapers fit between the crotch strap and the baby. In fact, a diaper keeps the baby an unsafe distance from the center of the entire 5 point harness system. So it stands to reason that the only safe baby is a naked baby. In 20 below zero temperatures, in Snowpocalypse.

I'm sorry for all that ranting. It just bothers me when the same people who circumcise (over a hundred dead baby boys a year in the US alone just from complications of circumcision) and formula feed (how many babies die from diseases that breast feeding might have prevented or from tainted formula [or water]?) throw fits about car seat covers and buttoned up coats.

And the dwarfs! We must think of the dwarfs! The aren't tall enough to be allowed to touch upholstery!

How to feed babies from outside of the bra

Danny ate avocado today. I just scooped it out of the peel and mashed it through a strainer and he ate it, and he LOVED it. No yucky face or spitting it out or anything. I skipped cereal altogether because it's just empty starch and carbs and why bother developing a taste for that? But now I'm looking down a long road of baby foods and the diapers will turn bad (I do not mind poopy diapers at all as long as it's just breast milk. Anything else and it's awful!) and I realized that I do not look forward to hearing about well-meaning friends' irrational fears of chunky foods. Sometimes it gets so hard to bite my tongue when I hear people say things that I know just aren't true. Here are a few of my pet peeves:

1. Gagging is not choking. All babies will gag at some point. Whether it's a puree, lumpy food, or an actual bite of something, the gag reflex will be triggered. When something gets too far back on the tongue, the throat gags. And it's a good thing! It means that they have the reflex they need in order to bring food back to the front of the mouth rather than just let things slide down into their windpipe. Gagging means their reflexes are preventing them from choking.
2. Choking happens when something blocks the windpipe. Hot dogs, grapes, round throat-sized foods are good at this. Small foods aren't that good at it. I almost laugh when I hear about someone who once tried to make their own baby food but couldn't get it smooth enough and didn't want their baby to choke on pea skin. How on earth is the skin from a pea going to block the windpipe? Is it going to stretch across like a dental dam? Smooth food is easier for babies to get used to after an all-liquid diet, but lumps are not safety hazards. Baby food does not have to be ketchup in order to be safe.
3. Babies don't often like new foods. It can take 15 tries before a baby likes a food, and after that it cam become their favorite food. Even if they eat and hate it every day for 2 weeks, try it again later. "My baby doesn't like green beans; I tried them last month" is a sure fire way to end up with a kid who won't eat vegetables. Because every time he makes a face at a flavor he's not sure of, it disappears forever. So try it again and act like he's never expressed an opinion before. It can't hurt.
4. It's not hard to make your own baby food. Do you cook for yourself? Do you own or can you get a food processor or blender? If yes, then you can make baby food. Steam vegetables and then pulverize them. Bake a sweet potato and then mash it up. Hell, all you have to do with avocados and bananas is let them get overripe and then mash them with a fork. I only put the avocado through a strainer today because it was Danny's first try at food ever. The only baby food I've ever bought is the meat, and I'm considering not even doing that this time. Oh, and that baby cereal I discounted earlier? It works great to thicken things that puree too thin. Canned peaches and pears make great baby food if you add the cereal to it, although I'd personally try to get fruit canned in plain juice, or at least rinse off the sugar.

A couple tips I've learned and like to pass on. Use ice cube trays to freeze the food and then just thaw one or two at a time in the microwave. And to fill the trays, put the food in a plastic baggie and cut a corner off. You can pipe it out like frosting.

Stop the extremism, and then off on a tangent.

I hate extremes. Which is odd, since I guess technically I should just strongly dislike extremes, hate being an extreme and all. I'll have to ponder that moderately someday. But anyway....

I am in favor of gun control. I don't want to ban them, but I'd like to think there's a way of keeping psychopaths from buying guns on a whim. I think people should be able to carry concealed weapons, with a permit.

I am opposed to abortion. But I am in favor of keeping it legal because as long as I can see some circumstance in which I might want to get one I feel I have no authority to say anyone else should never be able to get one. That said, I do not think abortion is a right, or merely something a woman chooses to do to her own body. There is, at the very least, a potential for life other than hers involved and that discredits, to me, the "It's my body" argument.

I am opposed to circumcision. Or should I say, to routine infant circumcision. I think it's pointless, needless, cosmetic, and not in a child's best interest at all. But I don't think it's mutilation, because I don't think a circumcised penis has been mutilated. I think a penis that went through a meat grinder would be mutilated, or an amputated penis, or a scarred up with a switchblade penis, but not a circumcised penis. However, I do think that certain forms of female genital mutilation are very much comparable to circumcision, like the ones where they just remove the labia as opposed to removing the clitoris and then sewing the whole thing up. And I think that as long as we say it is horrific and terrible and abusive for Africans to cut the labia off their young daughters so that the girls can a) look like their mothers, b) look more attractive and normal because in their culture all they ever see are vaginas without labia, and c) prevent the formation of smegma later in life, and then continue to circumcise our own sons for the exact same reasons, we are hypocrites and we are idiots for not even seeing it.

I think that when people go all extreme in their arguments the first (and often the only) thing they accomplish is to convince the other side that they are the only rational side there is. As long as the intactivists keep screaming about people mutilating their sons and ruining them, the pro-circumcision side will continue to think that we are all wackos who take this shit wayyy too seriously and that we are too unstable to pay attention to. Also, maybe we should stop ranting on about how much sexual pleasure there is in the foreskin and all that. People don't generally like to think about their infant sons getting off; it makes it harder to deal with the tiny erections that tend to pop up in smiling babies' diapers. When they say they don't want girls to laugh at an intact penis later on, they aren't imagining sex as much as they are imagining 2 people seeing each other naked, which is an important distinction for a mother. When we are tasked with all the bathing and diaper changing, we need to separate the organ from it's future function, or else we can't manhandle it the way we need to. (Baby boys poop all up around their junk, you need to move it around and really get under and around everything to wipe it clean. Laugh if you will, but desexualizing our children is a vital parental coping skill.

I need to be plural again

Four years ago I wanted a baby, in a bad way. Ryan was only 8 and she knew to pull me out of the baby section of Walmart by my arm when I started saying, "Ohhh, I want one." Now, 2 babies later, I have a whole new, yet similar, fever.

I want to be pregnant. Maybe it's knowing that I probably never will be again, but I feel really really sad when I see maternity clothes that I would have loved to have had before, or a pregnant woman absent-mindedly rubbing her belly, or even just remember some little detail from pregnancy. Like my discovery of deep fried pickles when I was pregnant with Tommy, or Applebees hot wings when I was pregnant with Danny. I miss feeling kicks, and resting my hands on the top of my belly, and I miss being okay with my figure. I know it's odd, but I only really like how I look when I'm in my last trimester. It's the only time when I feel like I have an excuse not to have a flat belly, when I look the way I want to look at that point. I love tight maternity clothes. Not skimpy ones, just tight ones. And it's the only time I'll wear a bikini. And now I face a life of not being happy with my figure. Even if I managed to lose enough weight and tighten up my abs, I have a very soft and squishy crepe-paper belly that doesn't look right unless it's filled out with an extra person. This isn't why I want to be pregnant, but it is a contributing factor. I'm not even sure I want another baby, at least not that I want one as bad as I just want to make one. If it weren't for my traitorous pancreas, I'd be a surrogate.