Does Santa wrap the presents or leave them open under the tree? Santa wraps presents and leaves them under the tree, sometimes weeks beforehand. When MM gets older and mom is less lazy, Santa will wrap presents in a different wrapping paper from all the others, and sign his name in a different handwriting than mom’s. They’ll also magically show up christmas morning as they should. As it stands now, he leaves things willy-nilly throughout the month. We also have presents under the tree from the cats, to the cats, to one cat from another cat, and from MM…I get bored saying “To Hubs, from Parking” so we mix it up.

If there’s one person I know who is simply ecstatic to be alive, it is this baby. He fills me with such joy when he smiles, because I know he’s not smiling just to smile, smiling to make me happy, smiling because it’s appropriate in the situation, smiling to keep up appearances, he’s just SO fucking happy he MUST smile. Truly, we should all hope to be as happy as a baby. It’s all so simple, and so very difficult.

MM and I are syncing up pretty well. We’re working on the next steps of sleep training, putting himself to sleep from total awakeness instead of almost asleep drowsies, and it’s coming along nicely if not slowly and with a few tears. He’s in a stage where we kind of just hang out all day, which is cool, and we’re good buds that understand each other. He’s got a little bit of separation anxiety that comes on after a few hours away from mom, this manifests itself with him hitting his dad “on purpose,” though I don’t know about that.

Hubs and I are working on things. Hard.

I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as far as my health goes. Goyum is going down so I can breathe a bit better, and I’m starting to feel a little bit of ….ohmygod energy once in a while. Sigh of relief.

Nicknames:

• Bugs
• Baby Guy
• Little King
• Flying boy/Normal boy

Achievements:

• Stopped caring about the nasal aspirator. Randomly. He used to SCREAM, and suddenly meh
• Grabbing!
• Touching different textures
• Caressing instead of flailing wildly
• Looking in the mirror/understanding mirrors a bit
• Holding his own bottle
• First experience with cereal! Next up, cocoa crispies
• Discovered feet and grabs left foot
• Holding head up looking only mildly tipsy
• Lots of talkies, lots of sounds, lots of conversations
• Moved to number 3 diapers at night, almost skipping size 2
• Able to turn toward soft sounds that are far away
• First on-purpose laughs
• Taking longer naps

Likes:

• Bashing things on things for the satisfying sound
• Eating fuzzy friends’ noses
• Crinkling his crinkly friend’s wings
• Rings
• Squealing/talking/giggling
• Laying on the floor watching mama fold laundry
• Sitting in the swing with toys
• Sitting on the couch
• Bumbo times
• Eating with a spoon, it’s ever so exciting
• Watching kitties do kitty things
• Flyin’!

Dislikes:

• Going to bed
• Tummy times
• When you do not respond to his talkies
• Getting strapped into the carseat without lots and lots of distraction

Four Weeks
Six Weeks
Eight weeks
Ten Weeks
Twelve Weeks
Fourteen Weeks

He kept wanting to stick his chest out

I took a picture of myself today, because I wanted to see how different I look now – now that my health has declined to a point where I feel like I am dying most of the time. Here’s a comparison

September:

Today:

Goo. At least my hair is covering Goyum the goiter. That’s what I’ve named her, as she is a non-jewish goiter.

Oh, hello.

That persistant sore throat I kept getting in the morning, the one that hung around all day and made me think, “Just get fucking sick already” That sore throat? Oh, that was my thyroid growing a fucking goiter.

Let me try to sum up the last two weeks or so into the smallest package I can….bullet points:

• Receive letter after business hours that states “Dr. Internist has referred you for an endocrinology consult” and think “What the fuck is an endocrinologist?! What’s wrong with me?!” Spend night talking to Dr. Brother who can give no information on why the referral was made and just says to call and ask in the morning, and pacing hallways worrying about what the hell the follow up blood test results showed
• Google “Endocrinologist”
• Call pharmacy the next day to refill birth control pills as I waited until the last pill. Find out that COBRA company never continued my insurance. SOUNDS FAMILIAR.
• Call COBRA company and leave message asking what the fuck, and also call me back
• Call endocrinology place to make appointment and leave message saying “My doctor has given me no information as to why, but wants me to see you”
• Call number on the letter that said “Call if you have questions!” Receptionist says “WHO?!” Leave message for person in charge of sending referrals and who can not help me at all
• Call endocrinology place again and leave another message
• Call endocrinology place again, get put on hold for 5 minutes, then have the following exchange:

Me: I have a letter here from my doctor saying that I’ve been referred for an endocrinology consult
Bitchy Fucking Receptionist: What for?
Me: Well, that’s the thing, it doesn’t say what’s wrong with me, just that I need to see an endocrinologist
BFR: We can’t make an appointment for you unless you know what it’s for
Me: Well, on the second page of the letter it says “Family history of hypothyroidism, see labs” so -
BFR: We don’t make appointments for Family Histories.
Me: (Laugh, because she’s such a bitch)
BFR: You’ll have to have the doctor fax us your medical records
Me: This is ridiculous, even though you’re in the same U of U system, she has to send the records?
BFR: Our fax number is #, we will call you when we receive them
Me: Fine.

• Call the number on the letter and ask to speak with Dr. Internist. Receptionist says “WHO?!” ….fucking look at a directory, grandma.
• Speak to a different receptionist who says that Dr. Internist is seeing patients, can they take a message and I say “YEAH, tell her that the endo people won’t make an appointment with me, they’ll apparently only make one for her, and I have no idea what’s wrong with me, and all I have is this letter and I’m kind of FREAKED OUT about it.” He says “…ok.”

Let’s pause here to point out that I have left about 7,000 messages and have yet to receive a call back from ANY OF THEM.

• Call COBRA people again, and get a lady nonchalantly say “Oh yeah, I sent that off today.” as if it’s standard procedure to WAIT A WEEK to submit coverage continuation. I KNOW you bitches were planning on keeping my premiums unless I called. I KNOW IT. She tells me that it’s 24-48 hours til it goes through
• Go online to insurance website and see coverage show up
• Go to pharmacy where they tell me I have no coverage. I’m sure I looked like I was going to fucking blow my brains out right there in the store, because a sweet little pharmacy tech called my insurance and had them push it through for me, then paged me over the store loudspeaker when it was all taken care of. Bless her little soul. Got my birth control
• Get call from COBRA people while I’m in the parking lot of the pharmacy saying that they’ll go ahead and try to get it pushed through faster. “I’ve taken care of it.” I say. You bastards.
• Call Dr. Internist’s office again, get through to another receptionist who says “That’s stupid” when I tell him what’s going on. He promises to help me. I never hear back
• Get call from endocrinology place the next day returning one of my messages. “I have a letter here from my doctor saying that I’ve been referred for an endocrinology consult.” “What for?” …..SIGH. “Hypothyroid?” “OK!”
• Wait an excruciating week, feel myself getting worse and worse
• Have really bad times with husband and his lack of understanding for the deep depression I’m sinking into. Tell him that the only solution is to be roommates, or he can leave, because I’m done having this fight
• Do not leave house, shower, or brush teeth for three days. Sleep at every possible opportunity.
• A goddamn week after the first letter, get letter in the mail from Dr. Internist that says that my TSH levels were elevated, finally telling me why she did the consult request.
• Submit strongly worded complaint about all of the above and get a call from the director of whatthefuckever, wanting to apologize
• Get call from receptionist in Dr Internist’s office asking me to come in to go over my endo history and to bring in any thyroid meds I’m on. Fuck you, bitch, I’m not waisting another copay on your ass, you’ve already passed me off onto someone else without so much as a courtesy phone call.
• Go to appointment with endocrinologist that looks like some sort of vampiric gothy russian girl with a thick accent.
• Finally get confirmation that everything I thought was happening to me is.

She said that what I had was postpartum thyroiditis. Essentially what this means is this: When you’re pregnant, your immune system is suppressed – so you don’t regect the baby. After baby comes and your body flips the fuck out, sometimes women will develop inflammation of the thyroid. Your own immune system will attack thyroid cells, which will release the thyroid hormones into your body. This causes temporary hyperthyroidism, or like a hyperactivity (see: all the projects I was doing a couple months ago). Now, since you’ve killed off those cells, there’s none left to release more of the thyroid hormones into your body so you drop down into hypothyroidism, which causes the tireds, the depression, the crappy feelings I’ve been having. Many women bounce back up to normal after this problem, but if you’re like me and everyone in your family has hypothyroidism, probably not.

So, when I initally went in and had to convince Dr. Internist to put me on thyroid meds, I had myself confused. The TSH count (thyroid stimulating hormone) should be low, and the free T4 should be high. This was what I had, so it gets tricky…I sort of looked fine but felt like ass, and it would have been impossible to tell had I not come back for another blood test a month later. At that point, I was slightly, slightly hyperthyroidy.

To recap, back then my TSH count was .009. That meant that my thyroid was producing so much of the thyroid hormone that the stimulating hormone didn’t have to do anything. My TSH count when I got re-tested on the 1st? 88.

Eighty mother-fucking eight. Dr. Endogoth said that above 30 they consider the thyroid essentially dead. I just started laughing. I laughed and laughed and she looked at me and said “Vat’s funny?” and I said that it was just that I had felt so awful for so long and finally the numbers agree with me. “Joo’re not cray-see” she said. Thank you. Thank you. I’m not fucking crazy. I’m not fucking clinically depressed, well… probably not. I’m just RIGHT. I knew it. So, the 25 mcg that they had me on was “A drop in za ocean” as Dr. Endogoth put it, and they’re doing full hormone replacement at 6 times that dosage. My inflamed, goitery thyroid will hopefully go down so I’ll be able to properly breathe and swallow, I’ll be able to lose weight instead of continuing to gain a pound or two a week because “Joor body doesn’t know to burn calories,” and I’ll be able to stop being so exhausted and defeated and depressed.

There’s a lot of healing to be done elsewhere in my life as well, these health and depressive problems have caused such a strain on my marriage that I don’t even feel comfortable talking about it. I just….heavy sigh about all of it. Heavy sigh. Things have never been so hard in my life, and I can honestly say that I was at the end of my rope. But. Now I have a little more rope. Because I was RIGHT, motherfuckers.

MM has been working really hard on grabbing things, mostly by thinking really hard about it and being mildly concerned:

The difficulty is in the whole “my eyes are here and my arms are flailing somewhere down there” thing. I get it.

He’s also getting into feeling soft things and squeeling with delight. This is nighttime bear, who does not have a name because he is asleep and therefore unable to tell us what his name is:

Can I just TELL you how excited I have been about him grabbing on to things like this? It’s a stuffed animal! And he grabs it! And he puts it in his mouth, where everything of worth goes!

The thing I find funny is that the brand of nighttime bear is “Just Friends.” It makes me sit and wonder, do they only make friends at the factory, or are you not allowed to be lovers with your stuffed animals? If the latter is the case, MM is in serious trouble.

Hubs says he looks like a drunk college kid who got caught kissing someone. Bonus points for flipping us the bird.

In other inappropriate baby talk, I came across this a while ago:

Are people just not as dirty minded as me, or is this wildly inappropriate? It seems like every week I’ll come across some baby thing with a double meaning, and I wonder when I’ll have to stop “heh, heh”ing and joking about it in front of MM. I really don’t want to answer the “Why is that funny?” question. “Uhh….because the pony has a spear sticking out of his back and there’s no way he could still run because he’d be losing too much blood.”

What? I don’t like horses at all .

I brush my teeth in the shower, because I have no time to get ready so I have to multitask. I also do this because it’s a Sonicare and I’m incapable of not spraying everything in site with toothpaste or drooling it all out of my mouth, and these things are acceptable in the shower. I brush, then hork my loogies down the drain, then get on to exfoliating with sandpaper or whatever it is that is next in my rigid shower protocol.

Today, I horked one of those been-stuck-in-the-back-of-my-nose-for-three-weeks-festering boogers into my mouth, which caused me to gag and barf all my coffee up in the shower.

Yep.

Dear internet:

Why do I keep waking up with this sickness c0ck-tease of a sore throat every day? Could it really be the smell coming from the new Sleep Number bed? Is it the bone-dry Utah winter descending?

I never noticed that the winters are so dry here, it’s just…how it is. Then Hubs came to live here and all the water was sucked out of his body the moment he stepped out of the car. I assume it’s how they run the water fountains in the temples.

Here’s the thing about Hubs, he has dry hands. No, he has FUCKING DRY HANDS, HOLY SHIT. They crack, they get psoriasis, I’ve never seen a smooth cuticle. During the winter, it’s even worse. We use a product called psoriasin on his psoriasis, which seems to work pretty well, but the general horrific dryness persists despite our best efforts. Several times a week we slather his hands up with Bag Balm and then add in four pumps of aveeno for good measure until his hands are a gooey mess. Then we put those moisture holdy innie gloves over the goo, and he sleeps in this. The improvement is slight, at best. Hubs also happens to be a compulsive hand-washer, so he’s got that against him as well.

So, dear internet friends, do you have any miracle cures for excessive dryness? ‘Cause the UDDER CREAM AIN’T WORKIN’.

The room would be sound-proof, and no one can see in. There would be no access to the door for anyone other than you. Inside, is a baseball bat and priceless china – something beautiful and fragile and something that makes a very satisfying sound when you whack the everloving shit out of it.

See, this room is the Mom Rage Room. When you are at the end of your fucking rope because _________ (Fill in the blank, mine today is “your baby has decided to throw all your weeks of sleep training out the window and scream in your ear for 60 minutes because you dare try to put him down for a nap when he’s so fucking exhausted), you can go into the room and destroy something beautiful, expensive, and …let’s throw in that it’s someone’s treasured possession.

You can scream at the top of your lungs, and perhaps go to town on it with your bare hands, ripping your palms and knuckles to shreds as you rage your Mom Rage. When you are finished, exhausted, sobbing in the corner, you may get up and leave the room. Miraculously, your wounds are healed, you have a ton of energy, a shitload of patience, and the precious thing inside the room has repaired itself….for next time. Something strikes you as funny, and you laugh hard, like you haven’t in months.

Also, the baby put himself down for his own fucking nap, and he’s left you a note letting you know what time he plans to be up so that you can do what you need within that timeframe.

Who will join me in this room?

There is quiet in the house, except for the soft sound of ocean waves rolling in coming through on the monitor. He sleeps to the sound of the ocean so he doesn’t wake up in silence. Suddenly, at 3 or 4 o’clock he’ll wake up and cry loudly. It jolts me out of sleep, and has done so so many times that I automatically started sleeping lighter for those few hours waiting for the sound. When his urgent cries hit me I jump out of bed, go into the bathroom and turn on the kettle. I count to 20 in my head, long enough to make the water warm and dissolve the formula in it. I shake up the bottle and walk in his room.

He’s laying there, all of his limbs are straight out like a little baby star. He has his eyes closed and is crying in despair, sometimes stopping to take a breath with his little mouth in a downturned frown. As soon as I pick him up he stops, opens his eyes, and looks at me. I curl him into my arms, put the pillow under him, move his head so that it’s centered and not off to the side he favors. He’s eating his hands so I have to gently push them aside to offer him the bottle. He recognizes what it is, and starts chowing down. I often make 1 or 2 more ounces at this feeding because he’s gone so long without food that he wants to eat the world. His eyes start to close again as he contentedly suck – sucks away. His left hand holds one of my fingers, his right hand holds my thumb. His little thumb pushes into the fleshy part on my palm, feeling how it springs back over and over. His little hands are cold, and he’s warming them up on mine.

He finishes the bottle and stops sucking, I take it out of his mouth and put it down. He flings his arms up, arches his back, and stretches with a nice big sigh. I spend a few moments just sitting there, listening to the ocean and his contented sighs. I rub the backs of his little hands with my thumb, making sure that they’re warm enough. I give him a kiss on his temple and he turns his face into me, smiling in his sleep. I tell him that I love him. Finally, I lift him up, remove the pillow, and put him back in his crib where he falls right back to sleep.

It’s the best part of my day, hands down.

Last night, he didn’t wake up ’til 6:00. He went to sleep without a fight and slept for 8 hours in a row, and I had another one of those moments where it hit me that he’s growing up perhaps a bit faster than I’d like. Our sleep training that we’ve been working so hard on is paying off, but I didn’t realize that eventually my baby won’t need this time with mama in the middle of the night. I didn’t realize that the “eventually” comes so much faster than you think.

I ended up privatizing the last post because after I worked on it all day between naps I lost perspective and it became less of a “Isn’t my sister such a helpless idiot?” to a “Let’s call child protective services!” post, which was not my intent and I’ve felt a little sick to my stomach about it since. So, there.

I also feel like I’ve just lost a shitload of readers lately, which makes my curl-up-in-a-hole instict kick in and wonder if I’ve been too honest about myself. If readers were going, “La la la! Another post about crotch cheese from sitting down in pregnancy! More talk about sleep deprivation and the challenges of not offing  yourself when the baby is screaming just so you can have a 15 minute break!” and then suddenly I’m a godless harlot lesbian. I know I shouldn’t write to the audience, and hopefully I write for myself, but you can’t help but start thinking about what you said that made your readership drop to 1/3 of what is was. Oh well.

Adding to the hatin’ on myself, I don’t think I’ve gone to bed without being extraordinarily defeated in a while. I am developing a habit of ending up in bed after the baby has been voluntarily crying himself to sleep in Hubs’ arms and think, “Well, I’m a failure at being a mom today.” Or not having enough energy to …wife… and thinking, “Well, I’m a failure at being a wife today.” Or, like yesterday, when I kicked my ass to make a big surprise for Hubs when he got home and he went, “Oh yay.” and I was fucking CRUSHED because I didn’t get the imaginary response I wanted from someone who had no idea how hard I had worked and therefore couldn’t say the “Oh my god your amazing strength” comments that I wanted to be validated with. Duh, me. Duh. How about you create a little more drama where there is none?

So, hatin’ on myself. That’s all I’ve got. And this, so that it’s not all downer.