• Need a new laptop bag? I’m giving one away on SundryBuzz.

30 Day Shred is horrifying and awesome. I have muscles in my armpits. ARMPIT MUSCLE OMG. My stomach is flatter, my arms are stronger, my butt migrated northward a bit. I’ll probably post a review about the workout on Gather.com this week, but suffice to say: it’s hard as hell, and totally worth it. 20 minutes, you guys! You can survive anything for 20 minutes, even if the instructor flat-out says “I WANT YOU TO FEEL LIKE YOU ARE GOING TO DIE” at one point, which, um, she does. She may also drop the term “gargling on your lungs”. But again: 20 minutes!

• JB is on Twitter, despite initially dismissing it as an activity on par with jerking off in public (which, fine, I may have done the same thing, mea fucking culpa). Please enjoy a sampling of his brain juices.

• Things that are pleasing me lately: Portia de Rossi’s wedding dress, the Twilight series, baking muffins with Riley (I love this recipe, so easy and adaptable — I added a bunch of blackberries that we’d picked and they turned out even more delicious, and purple!), season 2 of Dexter, listening to Fatboy Slim’s Acid 8000 at the loudest volume my ears can stand, and marveling over Sweet Juniper’s Eastern Market Flickr photos. How about you?

There’s this commercial, I think it’s one of those shmoopy Johnson & Johnson “Anything for Baby” ads, where a woman is roused from her comfy bed in the dead of night by her blatting infant (the husband, of course, merely rolls to one side, snores heavily, and lets loose a gunshot-loud fart. I mean, I’m assuming that’s what he does). She comes into the nursery yawning with a look on her face like “Motherfuckerrrrrrrrrr”, but as soon as she picks up her baby she’s all, oh, who’s a widgey widdle pookums? YOU are! And during the diaper change she busts out with this retrained I-have-makeup-on-at-3-AM TV-version of an OM NOM NOM NOM on the baby’s belly. I think the tagline was something like “Midnight Snack.”

I saw that ad during my last pregnancy and I frankly found the whole thing obnoxious, because shut up, anything for baby. Oh, so it’s not enough that my sleep is ruined by the leg restlessness and heartburn and constant peeing and hemorrhoids the size of Concord grapes erupting forth from my poor, horrified rear end, I get to look forward to months of midnight poop-smeared awakenings and I’m not even allowed to resent it.

Now that it’s been a good six months and counting of being woken up every single night, I feel like I’m living that damn ad. Every night, somewhere in the wee hours between 2 and 5, Dylan starts squawking, and without even thinking I get up and trudge into his room. I never lie there thinking, well, THIS is bullshit; my legs automatically swing out from under the covers and I’m down the hall before my eyes are even halfway open (I assume this is some deep seated self-preservation tactic, drawn forth from some ancient reptilian corner of my brain to keep me from just up and smothering the child when he interrupts that shamefully hot cougar-vampire dream I was having about Edward Cullen).

Once I’m in there and sitting in the rocking chair with the lights dimmed and Dylan nestled in the crook of my left arm like a pudgy, feetie-pajama’d otter, contentedly taking deep pulls off his bottle, I rest my lips on the the top of his head and smell the summer-grass aroma of his hair. And then, when I change his diaper, I do in fact find myself unable to keep from smooching his puffed-out belly while his legs bicycle furiously and he makes that goofy, pleased “BMMMMM” sound with his mouth at me.

The whole process is fairly painless and quick: I feed him, change him (I’ve tried to skip the changing step but have found that it’s not worth the potential disastrous results), and I put him back down. He’s usually wide awake at that point, but for some glorious, mysterious reason he doesn’t complain. Occasionally I hear him sort of babbling to himself after I go back to bed, but for the most part he stays quiet and content until he falls back to sleep on his own — a far cry from the furious I WILL BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSES AND SHIT ON YOUR TOOTHBRUSHES attitude he displays when I put him down for his daytime naps.

So he isn’t sleeping through the night (this hasn’t changed since he started solids, and JB is still giving him a bottle around 11-11:30 whether he wakes up on his own or not), but it’s not a major inconvenience. Anything for baby, right? (Barf.) The real problem is that that’s what his routine is like if we put him down in the swing. If we put him in the crib, all bets are off: he wakes up after only an hour or two, he howls like a banshee when he gets put back down.

He’s not yet at the weight limit for the swing but he’s able to partially sit up in the damn thing (we strap him in, but that only contains his lower half) and then gets all whomperjawed, lying off to one side and grousing angrily. So clearly the swing’s days are numbered. But the swing means sleep! The crib means constantly getting up, and having to deploy long drawn out comfort methods to get him back down! My anything for baby capacity begins running real low after I’ve been up at 1, 2:30, and 4 AM, you know what I mean?

Anyway, I’m wondering if any of you inadvertently caused a Swing Addiction or similar with your child, and how you got over it with a minimum of suck-assedness?

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