Sep
21
September 21, 2006
I changed my work schedule slightly so that starting next week I’ll be going to the office Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays rather than Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The current gap of being at home both Fridays and Mondays makes it hard to stay connected at work, which hasn’t been overly problematic yet, but soon my workload is going to increase as we slide hellishly into Neverending Macworld Preparations.
I also thought it might be nice to divvy out my Riley-days a little more, especially as the weather turns to crap and I have to get more creative about entertainment options. Currently, by the time Monday rolls around I’ve had three days with the suctopus and, well, my reserves are running low. Then again, sometimes by Thursday afternoon I feel like all I’ve done all week is be in the office, rather than hanging out with my boy. Under the new schedule I hope I’ll be happily anticipating my mid-week Riley break, and my work days won’t feel like they’re tipping my Life Balance scales in the wrong direction.
If there is a way to do this – the working-mom thing – perfectly, I sure don’t know what it is. All I can do is aim for what feels right, and change the situation if it gets off kilter.
I have been thinking lately about the kind of future I want to build for myself careerwise. I like working at Workplace right now; I like the things I do at my job, I like the people I work with and the culture (mostly), I like the many benefits I’m provided. But if I could earn the same amount of money or more doing anything I wanted, what would that be?
Writing would be a big part of it, because I love writing and I think that for the most part well maybe at least sometimes okay every now and then I do not completely suck at it (pardon my self-confidence while it just sort of, like, spooges all over the computer screen, okay?).
But I’ll tell you something, it is also very important to me to get out and interact with people. It’s important for me to have a schedule that I have to adhere to, however flexibly. Otherwise the wormy, undisciplined part of my nature takes over and entropy descends.
What does that bode for my future employment, I wonder. Will I need to always work for someone, get up and drive to an office and earn a paycheck? Or will I learn the skills I need to branch out on my own someday, in whatever direction that might mean? I feel like I’ve gained so much strength this past year, I’ve become so much more motivated to invest my time and energy into the things in my life that fulfill me, and shouldn’t I be able to figure out the next steps? Shouldn’t I know what I want to be when I grow up?
You know, it seems kind of…I don’t know, controversial to even admit that I think about those things as a parent. Like I should be satisfied with my role as Mommy because, after all, it’s The Most Important Job There Is. Which I don’t disagree with; more than anything I want to be the best mom to Riley that I can be. But I want to be successful in other areas too.
The road in front of me is almost unrecognizable than the one that was there two years ago. This one has steeper curves, higher sides; the stakes are high, the consequences expansive. It unfurls like a gloriously complicated ribbon and there are times when I cannot believe this confusing, rewarding, beautiful life is actually mine.
Sep
20
September 20, 2006
While I find myself occasionally mourning Riley’s headlong plummet into toddlerhood, something I definitely have not missed about the Very Wee Stage of Babyhood are the milk-horks. Spitting up wasn’t as gross as I had imagined it might be (it’s less of an Exorcist pea-soup blast and more of a quiet burble), but jesus god, the smell of urped formula….deadly.
Riley never spit up all that much, since our family was thankfully spared the hell of reflux (not that I would know firsthand, I’m just making a stab in the dark that a baby with reflux is a Mighty Goddamn Sorrowful Situation), but I went through those piles of little washcloths at a pretty good clip all the same. JB ascertained that a bit of spitup was a good sign, as it meant Riley had eaten just a smidge over the perfect amount and was only jettisoning the excess. Then again, he wasn’t the one doing twelve loads of laundry a day.
“Stopped spitting up” doesn’t seem to be something I made a notation of in my exhaustive efforts to document every single solitary moment of Riley’s existence, but he hasn’t done it for quite a while. So on the sunny afternoon of his birthday, while we were at the zoo and had stopped for a bucolic picnic lunch, it was fairly surprising when he started to hork.
Let me just…let me just give you some facts, here. He had eaten a large amount of, oh god I can barely type it, scrambled eggs that morning. He had a healthy quantity of milk in his belly, having hoovered down a few bottles throughout the day. And I had just given him some Honey Nut Cheerios.
Well, I don’t know exactly what went wrong, that afternoon at the Woodland Park Zoo. My theory is that he gagged on a Cheerio, which triggered the catastrophic events that followed. Basically, he started spitting up milk, and then, all of a sudden, turbo barfed an entire Lake Superior worth of disgustingness all over himself and the stroller.
I have no idea how one baby could contain that much volume; it was like clowns leaving a Volkswagen. It just coming and coming and I was flailing for the only thing I had on hand, a small paper napkin (!!), and I was freaking out that he was going to choke and man oh man, we had NO extra outfits with us.
After that he seemed perfectly fine, albeit slightly less adorable than forty seconds beforehand. We cleaned up as much as we could with a sheet I had packed to spread on the grass and a bottle of water, and drove home with the windows down, leaving a palpable trail of Stank behind us. Later, JB sprayed down the stroller with a hose, and if you have a better method of removing a kegload of semi-digested scrambled eggs from canvas, I’d sure like to hear it. Because truthfully, it still smells a little…not so fresh.
Overall, I learned that I vastly prefer the tiny-infant spitup to the larger-child Full Scale Vomit. I guess it’s just one more thing to get maudlin about when I sift through his 0-3 sized onesies and hum “Sunrise, Sunset” to myself.
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Apropos of nothing, I’d like you to know I am quite disturbed by Cecil Dill and his musical hands.
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Also: hey guess what? I made a new website, specifically for housing all the product-related conversations and pimpfests I so greatly enjoy. I plan to use it to tell you about cool stuff I like, and ask you questions about stuff you like, and generally indulge my deep, deep desire to talk about trivial consumery shit. It’s called sundrybuzz, and it’s right here. Come visit! Tell me if it’s horribly broken in your web browser, so that I may cry piteously into my monitor.
(Also also: only recently did I realize I named the site similarly to Melissa’s cool new column. I am an unoriginal dickmunch.)
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My product review site:
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