Wednesday 22 June 2011

A Story About Poo

Sadly this is a story about Poo as in excrement and not Pooh as in the cute bear who likes honey.

Early the other morning the little boss woke up hungry.  He normally wakes up for a feed between 5:00 and 5:30, so it wasn't anything out of the ordinary.  I fed him, and then my husband volunteered to burp and change him.  It's turning into a lovely, early morning family moment.

Then he decides to just change him on the bed.  So he starts changing him.  Midway through changing, Little Boss starts to poo.  I mean serious poo.  It squirts everywhere.  You might think from little tiny baby nappies that this wouldn't make much of a mess.  You would be wrong.

Poo ended up on Little Boss and his clothes, all over our bedding (including pillows), all down my husband's arm and side, on my book, on the nursing cushion...  Every time we thought that we'd cleaned it all up, we'd find something else with baby poo on it.

Sometimes baby's are just the most adorable thing on the planet.  Sometimes they're the most disgusting things on the planet.  And sometimes they manage to be both at once.

Just in case you wanted a story about the other type of Pooh, I'll throw that in too.

Princess and Angel both have Winnie the Pooh teddy bears.  In fact, I think they have multiple Pooh bears and most of the rest of the Hundred Acre Wood as well.  As Little Boss was napping (having worn himself out pooing all over our bedroom), Angel tip-toed up to his bed carrying a small Winnie the Pooh teddy.  Very carefully she laid it in bed next to him and then tucked them both in with a baby blanket.  She noticed me as she was tip-toeing away again.  "I'm sharing my teddy," she said, "I love my brother."

As Winnie the Pooh put it, "Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart."   

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Little Hands


What is it about little baby hands? 

I love looking at my newborn's hands.  They are so small, but perfectly formed.  He has long fingers-just like his daddy's.  As he's still a newborn, he moves his hands around a lot without having real control over them.  Sometimes he'll punch himself in the eye and then glare at his hand as if to say "What did you do that for?".  To his sister Angel's delight, he wriggles sometimes so that it looks like he's waving at us.  The Little Boss also likes to grab onto my clothes when he's breastfeeding.

The one thing that he does have control over is holding hands.  He likes to hold hands...only he's so small that it's not really holding hands.  It takes his whole hand to hold on to one of my fingers.  In fact, when he was first born he gripped on to one of daddy's fingers and held on with surprising strength.  He likes to fall asleep in my lap or on my chest clinging on to one of my fingers.  I think it makes him feel secure being able to hold on to us.

Monday 13 June 2011

If you feel like a bad parent, read this to feel better...

So it's an ordinary afternoon.  I'm breastfeeding baby and the girls have been playing a game together.  When Angel disappeared from the room for a few minutes, I didn't think anything of it.  I just figured she was getting another toy for their elaborate game (which seemed to involved as many different toys spread across the floor as possible).  I didn't get worried until she started crying, and even then I didn't think it was anything serious.  I could hear her walking back into the room with me, so I didn't even bother getting up at first.

Then she came in holding her eye.  "I was putting on make-up," she sobbed, "and it got in my eye and it hurts."  I looked at her and realized that she was not just putting on makeup.  She had found a bottle of sparkly nail varnish and had used it to try to do her eye make up.  That's right.  She had painted all around her eyes with nail polish.  Glittery pink nail polish, to be precise.  I did the obvious thing and started screaming for my other half to come help.

It took two of us, the sink, and a lot of wet wipes to get her eyes (mostly) clean.  Let me tell you---nail polish does not come out of eyelashes easily.  Also, stupid sparkly nail polish means that even if you manage to get the polish mostly off, your toddler still ends up with glitter all over them (and potentially in their eyes).  Since she had painted around her eyes, we couldn't use anything like nail polish remover to try to get it off.

Luckily, thankfully, miraculously she did not actually get any of the nail varnish on her eyeball (as far as we could tell). 

Sometimes I feel like I'm really on top of things and a good parent...then inevitably something like this happens.  The funny thing is that I am not a yummy mummy.  I don't normally wear nail polish.  I had just painted my nails for the first time in about six months, and so had pulled out the nail polish from its dusty hiding place in my bedroom.  I guess I'm going back to my normal, nail-coloured-nails again from now on.

Moral of the day: toddlers and nail varnish do not mix...or at least they shouldn't.

Thursday 9 June 2011

The Birth!

I just spent about an hour writing up a lovely blog post with the whole birth story.  Then I hit the publish button and the whole thing inexplicably disappeared.  So now don't have the time or the inclination to rewrite the whole thing,

I'll just sum up the major points.

It was a planned c-section with a spinal block.  It wasn't planned for the doctors to still have to use forceps.  (Luckily there was only a small red mark on one side of his head and it faded quickly.)

My husband got to cut the cord.  Then they laid our little boy across my chest.  He cried and wriggled and gurgled.  I got to enjoy skin on skin contact with him.  My husband put out a hand to help steady him, and he immediately grabbed on to one of daddy's fingers.  He kept holding on until he had to be moved.

The little boss was covered in blood and vernix, and absolutely perfect.  After years of waiting, I was thrilled to finally meet our little boy.