Not the brightest bulb on the block

That would me, not Baby M, although he did spend the better part of the afternoon playing with a slotted spoon. However, I think that is just because he's a baby, not due to any dimness on his part. I'm the one who seems to have a short circuit these days.

I admit that I have had my share of forgetfulness and inattention brought on my months of sleep deprivation, but up until now I felt that my reasoning skills remained generally in tact. Well, no more. Today I had a serious case of Mommy Brain (and not the good kind that helps with empathy and multi-tasking).

Baby M loves to splash around in the sink, but he is getting too big to hold over the sink comfortably so today I had the inspired idea to let him splash around with a bowl of water on the kitchen floor. I sat him down with a big Tupperware bowl containing a few inches of water. I expected the floor to get a bit wet from his splashing, but I did not foresee what would have been obvious to my former self-- Baby M immediately picked up the bowl and dumped the contents all over himself and the floor. I felt like a complete moron, but on the up side, the floor got mopped this week.

Hunger Strike

Okay, so it's not exactly a hunger strike since Baby M still nurses like a champ, but he is refusing all solid food and has been ever since I first tried to tempt him with some rice cereal three and half weeks ago. I find this turn of events particularly surprising for two reasons. First off for the past few months Baby M has put anything and everything in his mouth. I have uttered "telephones are not for eating", "our friends are not for eating" and "the dog is not for eating" more times than I can count. Secondly both my husband and I eat just about everything. Really. We eat red meat and carbs, seafood and hot dogs, ice cream and cotton candy. You will never have a problem accommodating us at a dinner party. Naturally we thought Baby M would follow in our gastronomical footsteps. But, alas, he seems to be forging his own path.

So far we've tried rice cereal, avocados, bananas and pears. Every feeding session starts out the same, with Baby M screaming as we strap him into his high chair (this reaction is common to any contraption with straps-- car seats, strollers, etc.) After a few choruses of The Hokey Pokey and some fun games with Mommy's ponytail Baby M is in a good enough mood to try some food. Every spoonful is preceded by an elaborate spoon ballet with Battlestar Galactica inspired sound effects and met with a grimace and spitting out of the offending substance. Lately Baby M has taken to stuffing his bib into his mouth in a preemptive strike against eating. I sense he may be a stubborn child.

Our pediatrician says not to worry and to just keep on trying to feed him a couple of times a day. In the meantime I guess I'll just work on my Hokey Pokey.

Parasomnia and Nightmares

I am reading yet another sleep book (Sleeping Through the Night by Jodi Mindell). I know I keep saying that I need to quit reading these parenting books, but I just can't stop myself. This particular book is written by an associate director of a sleep disorders center and now I am convinced that Baby M has parasomnia.

Baby M has not been sleeping for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time during the night so I've gotten into the habit of napping with him in the afternoon. He nearly always wakes up from his nap crying inconsolably, even when I am lying right there next to him. He doesn't seem to notice me when I pat his back, say his name or even pick him up. According to the book, this could be a case of Confusional Arousal, which is a mild form of parasomnia and apparently very common. The author's advice is to just leave him alone.

Initially I wondered if Baby M could be having nightmares. I can still recall my childhood nightmares and remember crying out for my parents in a panic. My parents generally found my nightmares hilarious, although to their credit, they saved their laughter for the following morning and did their best to offer comfort and a sympathetic ear in the middle of the night. However, I will always remember the night my mother couldn't stop giggling when I described the "sponge-nose bandit" nightmare. I dreamed that my brother had a kitchen sponge on his face where his nose should have been. An evil sponge salesman cut off my brother's sponge-nose so that he could sell it which resulted in my brother's death. Looking back I can see how a 4 year old tearfully explaining how her brother's nose was a highly sought after sponge is funny, but at the time my mother's laughter was the exactly the opposite of what I needed. I don't have too many items on my "Things my parents did that I'll never do" list because they were pretty good parents, but laughing at my child's nightmares is one of them.

Baby Legs

I heard about Baby Legs, the funky baby leg-warmers that come in a million different colors and patterns, back when I was still pregnant and thought they sounded like a great idea. They promised to keep baby's legs warm, make diaper changes easier and protect little knees once baby starts crawling. Plus they are super-cute. I fully intended to pick up a pair for Baby M but shopping for baby leg-warmers moved to the bottom of priority list once Baby M was born.

So I was excited to see that Mechie, a new children's boutique on Venice Blvd that happens to be on our afternoon walking route, carried a good selection of Baby Legs. I picked up a cool striped pair for Baby M.

A few days later I got a chance to try them out and pulled the Baby Legs on along with a red onesie. Most of the photos I'd seen show the leg warmers going up pretty high on the baby's thigh with just a thin strip of skin showing between the sock and the diaper. Well, I could barely get the leg warmers up over Baby M's knees. Now Baby M is a big boy. He measures consistently above the 90th percentile in both height and weight and has been called "sturdy", "hefty" and "solid." Now it is obvious that we should also call him "thunder thighs".

Even though they didn't look the way I had expected I was not ready to give up on the Baby Legs yet. Besides, they were still cute in a weird, Flashdance kind of way. I carried Baby M out to the living room where my husband and his friends were watching a basketball game. They took one look at Baby M and asked "So is he going to Jazzercise?" My husband, appalled, said that Baby M looked like Richard Simmons and demanded that I remove the leg warmers and put him in some proper pants. So the Baby Legs are back in the drawer for now, but I'm not giving up on them. Once Baby M starts moving those thighs might thin out and if not, maybe we'll find a Mommy & Me Jazzercise class. There's got to be one out there somewhere.

Shhh... He's Not Sleeping

So just about every new parent has a story that starts, "I was so sleep deprived I...[fill in the blank] ." Maybe Mom put the diaper on over the onesie or Dad drove to work in a pressed shirt and pajama bottoms. This week I made spaghetti for dinner and instead of opening up a jar of spaghetti sauce I cooked up a nice batch of spaghetti and meatballs with Garlic Lover's Salsa. What's even more telling is that my husband and I diligently ate this concoction without noticing anything was amiss until I threw the jar into the recycling bin after dinner.

Baby M is nearly 6 months old now and not anywhere close to sleeping through the night. He is still up 2 or 3 times a night. We have had the occasional night with only one waking-- to be precise we've had exactly 3 of them. I recall those nights fondly and wish for their quick return. As Oz pointed out her blog Knocked Up, people always want to know if your baby is sleeping through the night yet and judge your baby (or you) based on the answer. The older Baby M gets, the more inadequate I feel when I have to admit that, no, he is not sleeping through the night. And aside from feeling inadequate I am also feeling dead tired. So I am going to stop telling people exactly how often Baby M wakes up and stop explaining all of the strategies we've tried to get him to sleep longer. I am going to follow Oz's lead, answer that he sleeps like a baby and leave it at that.

I'm Disgusting

Since becoming a parent I have done many things that I would have found repellent in my former life. I've smelled Baby M's bottom to see if he needed a diaper change and stuck my finger in his diaper if the smell test was inconclusive. I've picked buggers out of his nose. I've spent days in a spit-up covered sweatshirt with unwashed hair. I'm regularly soaked with drool, but today I reached a new low.

Baby M & I went to the Bridge theater at the Howard Hughes Center for the Mommy & Me screening of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (good movie, but not as much fun as the Mommy & Me screenings at the Grove). About halfway through the movie I took out a Lara Bar to snack on. Since I was holding the Lara Bar it was by default Baby M's favorite new toy and a brief struggle ensued. Then he got distracted by my water bottle and I was able to unwrap and take 2 bites of the bar before he changed focus and whacked it out of my hand onto the floor. I'm not sure if you are familiar with Lara Bars, but they are made out of nuts and fruit and have a slightly sticky consistency. Even if I had picked it up within the constraints of the 5 second rule, which I definitely did not, it's probably not the sort of thing you want to eat off the floor of a movie theater. But, I was really hungry. Since I've been breastfeeding I am hungrier than I ever was when I was pregnant. I reasoned that it was the first screening of the day and the floor was probably cleaned the night before, and really how dirty could it be? So I picked up the Lara Bar and finished it. Unfortunately, while I was eating it I realized exactly how dirty the floor could be.

Toys! Toys! Toys!

When I was pregnant I was pretty adamant that my house would not become a giant nursery. Baby M's room would of course, have baby stuff, but I saw no reason for my living room to turn into Romper Room. And up until a few weeks ago we had kept the number of toys, especially those of the giant plastic variety, to a minimum. We really only had 1 offender-- the Fisher Price Kickin Bobbin Gym, a monstrosity I had fully intend to return, but lost the gift receipt and ended up putting it together in a desperate attempt to get out of singing yet another chorus of "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes." And, I have to admit, Baby M does seem to enjoy kicking at it.

But a few weeks ago I broke down and bought the giant plastic toy of all giant plastic toys, the Exersaucer. Technically, I bought the Graco Baby Einstein Discover and Play Activity Center, but it's the same idea; a seat for the baby surrounded by different toys. I took Baby M to Babies R Us and had him try out all of the exersaucers, jumperoos, etc and this is the one he liked best. He is especially fond of the push buttons that say the name of animals in English and Spanish. He pushes them with his head instead of his hands, but I'm sure he is just trying to absorb more vocabulary via osmosis. So now I have this giant plaything sitting next to my dining room table, but it is worth it. For the first time in 4 months I can eat dinner without a baby in my lap.

We have also accumulated a variety of rattles, boards books and stuffed animals but Baby M's favorite thing to play with is a gallon sized ziploc bag full of bagel chips. Of course he only gets to hold this bag under careful supervision but it is still the highlight of his day. Now I finally understand why toy companies always label those plastic bags that hold toy parts with the message "Not a Toy. Keep out of reach of children.", it's for parent's like me!