Awkward.

At work today I gave another presentation on healthcare reform and had an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And, no, I'm not particularly special - it was a transitional interview, so I really didn't do more than sit there and pass notes across the table to my boss, who was doing the talking. The idea is that I'll eventually take over all public speaking for our product - our VP has asked my boss to relinquish all media interviews to me, so I sat on this one with our PR director and observed, I'll do the talking next time and after that, it'll be just me and the PR director.

The whole situation is really odd and uncomfortable, but apparently while I was on maternity leave and my boss gave interviews to certain well-known publications, he let some of his ignorance and political views seep into the discussions, so he was barred from interviewing without me, the PR director or both to serve as chaperon until I received more formal media training to take over the interviews entirely. I was also given three of his speaking engagements for next month and October and asked to attend the AARP conference to exhibit. I don't know what to make of this. I'm flattered, but it's weird and I don't like it.

Long time, no write.

I need to get my act together again. I'm gaining weight, falling back into disorganization and not writing again. It's funny how when one area of discipline falls apart, the rest follows in short order. I don't think it's about to get any better in the next few days. Evelyn has a sore throat, complete with oogey red tonsils. It doesn't look like strep, though.

One thing I have to wonder about sick babies - why is having an illness akin to feeding them rocket fuel? They wake every 30 minutes at night, won't nap during the day, yet somehow are cheerful and can run circles around their parents despite having a relatively high fever. I'm exhausted and, though she has the runs from all the mucous and won't stop rubbing her eyes, every time I try to put her to sleep, she starts playing with my breast, eating my arm or trying to climb out of her crib. How is she not at least crabby as hell? Not that I'm complaining. Ugh. I'm jittery from all the coffee, but think I need more caffeine to stay awake.

Love, luck and blight.

My sister called a few days ago, asking all kinds of questions about how I'd felt and what happened when I was pregnant, when I asked if she was pregnant. There was total silence on the other end of the phone. I was so happy for her. Unfortunately, just a few days can change everything. She is in the throes of a miscarriage now. Her gestational sac was empty, something they also call a blighted ovum. Interesting choice of words. Blight. It's a much larger word than the object it describes. Her pregnancy hormones are falling and she now has to take Plan B or have a D&C to flush her uterus. She has chosen Plan B.

I have no idea how to describe how awful I feel for her. During Christmas, she held Evelyn and cried because she said she didn't know when she'd be able to have a baby herself. There was no end in sight - her husband hadn't been employed in more than two years, they had student loans to pay and a mortgage and she was trapped in a job she hated because she was carrying everything financially and had been for two years.

Then, like magic, things began to come together over the last six weeks. Her husband got a job, which allowed them to feel comfortable starting a family. She discovered she was pregnant, got a new job and quit her old one. Then the part that meant the most to her was taken away.

I know miscarriages are very common in early pregnancy and that she will probably go on to have a healthy pregnancy. And if she was only five or six weeks into the pregnancy, but still. It represented a lot to her and now it's gone. And it sucks.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I totally forgot how much this part of motherhood sucks. Our daughter just got tooth #2. With it apparently comes a remarkable desire not to sleep. It's not only pain (only from the shrieking in there, it's probably partially pain) - it's also that switch that went off in her head that prompted her to wake me at 3 a.m. to have a three-hour long attempt at a discussion. Sadly, I haven't slept since.

What's worse for me, though, is the guilt. Yeah, I really can't do anything than give Tylenol to make the tooth feel better. But, the muscles in my back are aching, burning and just generally not in the right places. I had to hand her off to my husband for a few minutes. My husband, lucky man, doesn't have the same visceral reaction I do to my daughter's crying. I want to find what's causing it and obliterate it. He calmly puts on some muting headphones (he can hear her, but it's not as piercing) and carries her around until she's done crying and ready to sleep. Unfortunately for me, she cries a lot more with him.

So, while I'm out here feeling miserable, guilty, exhausted, frustrated and sore, I'm also treated to her shrieking, something I know I could alleviate just by walking in there and taking her from my husband. Seriously, I pick her up and it's like someone hit the off switch. God, I hate this. It's even worse knowing Ragsy is probably laying in bed with his hands clamped over his ears.

I know I should let the two of them figure it out. After all, it's not like I left her all alone. Someone who loves her is carrying her and quietly talking to her. Ugh. How sad is it that I'm trying to rationalize taking a much-needed break to avoid screaming myself and scaring the daylights out of a baby and setting a stellar example for my son? Oh, well. I hope she stops crying soon. I'm tired, sore, have an incredibly bad headache and I think my blood pressure is probably sky high by now.

Long time, no write.

It's not that nothing interesting has happened to me. It has. I just forget what it was by the time I go to make a blog post, so I haven't written in a long, long time. But, since I'm rapidly forgetting how to string two sentences together, I thought I'd write.

Not much is going on. Like I said, I forgot all the interesting stuff than happened to me. At the moment, the worst thing that's happened this week is that Ragsy's been a bit out of sorts and there's been a tuition hike at preschool & daycare. Fantabulous. I love having children, but they're so freaking expensive.

The best thing that has happened this week is that I was asked to serve as an expert on healthcare reform for two magazines who found a white paper I wrote for my company on managing retiree healthcare costs. But this is a mixed bag. I'm still waiting for people to realize that I'm not an expert. I'm just some chump who read all 2500 pages of the healthcare reform bill and was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to retain some of it. Oh, well. At least I get the credit for these.

Other than that, I'm still completely sleep deprived and feel a slight malaise (that only the genius possess and the insane lament). You know how you've achieved one goal, then you're in between goals? Yeah - that's about where I am. Both Adit and I are pretty sure we're done having children, so we're both struggling with ideas on what we do now. Of course - raise the kids. But what else? We'd both like to be rich. Wouldn't everyone? But how do you do that? And is what we would have to do something we'd be willing or even interested in doing? And if we decide not to do that, then what?

Ugh, anyway. So tired. Too bad Evelyn woke up three times last night. I was up way too frequently for my well being. Thank goodness she's begun to eat some solids. She still eats every hour and a half during the day (even with a meal in the middle of the day and the evening), but she's finally accepting something that's not me. Cereal of any sort really hurts her stomach, but the fruits & veggies are finally starting to have some appeal. I swear, by the time she's actually eating solids reliably, she'll be on finger foods. Not that that's a bad thing. So far when she does eat solids, she eats what we do anyway, so she's usually a cheap date.

Lazy Thursday.

Well, not really. Evelyn is sick. She cut a tooth last night (or rather, around 4 this morning) and is in the beginning stages of an ear infection, thanks to all the tooth-related congestion. We're not doing a whole lot, but sometimes not doing a whole lot takes a lot of time.

First, there was a half hour wait before we got our things together to go to the pediatrician. Then there was the visit itself. Then the trip to Schnucks (did you know they have free generic antibiotics?), then we got home around 11. Evelyn's been sleeping in roughly half-hour intervals, but even that sleep isn't particularly restful. It's punctuated by coughing and snorting. Then when she wakes up enough to fuss, I nurse her because she hasn't been eating much. Then she falls back to sleep because she can breathe at last and we do the whole thing over again.

Her pediatrician told me that she was healthy enough to go to daycare, but I made the decision early on not to take her. It seems silly for her to be miserable at daycare when I can give her my undivided attention, time at the breast and carry her around as much as she wants and get her to sleep more frequently (if not better) than they can at daycare.

I think I'll try to take a nap. Note that the operative word here is try. I'm smart enough to know it ain't gonna happen, but hopeful enough to try.

This boring post brought to you by the letter S for SLEEP (I need some) and the number 4:30, which is when I went to bed last night/this morning.

Attach this.

So, for the first time, I read Attachment Parenting by Dr. William Sears. I wasn't impressed. It wasn't the ideas I had a problem with them. Actually, I think that attachment parenting makes a lot of sense. But the whole book could've been summed up with:

1. Breastfeed if you can for as long as you can.
2. Bedshare if you want to.
3. Carry your kid a lot.
4. If something's not working, try something else or get help.

I suppose the above wouldn't have sold well, but my problems with the book were as follows:

1. As with any book advocating something "unusual," it's preachy and defensive.
2. Much of the "evidence" it referred to was anecdotal, taken from Dr. Sears' practice. I think that some amount of this would've been helpful, but I know from prior research that a large and growing body of actual, scientific data backs up most of the ideas in the book. That was very frustrating because it seemed as though the author was too lazy to do any external research himself, almost as though he had all the answers already, or thought he did.
3. The suggestions Dr. Sears gives for decompressing are irritatingly stereotypical. For example, in several sections, he recommends that to relax, the mother go take a bubble bath or sew. I actually enjoy sewing and it does help me decompress when I think to do it, but... Honestly? Sew?
4. Some of the anecdotes in the book were completely unbelievable.
5. It was way, way, way too long for a book that offers just a few ideas and only anecdotes to back them up. I felt like the same thing was being pounded into my head over and over.

So there. Love the ideas in Attachment Parenting, hate the author's style.

So very tired.

I'm just about wiped out. Evelyn either had a really weird cold that involved only congestion, or she's teething. Regardless, in addition to lots of hand gnawing, said stuffy nose coincided with another little *click* in her brain. Normally that's delightful, but I've noticed that as children get older, clicks also mean that whatever you'd been doing before that was guaranteed to get them to sleep suddenly doesn't work anymore. Seriously - one day it works, then the next day it never works again ever. So frustrating!

Anyway, until Thursday night I've been able to just carry her around for five minutes, jiggling her gently, to get her to sleep. Then Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, yesterday and now today, I've spent two hours or more alternately carrying her and gently laying her down while I walk away for a few minutes so I don't get too tense from carrying around a screaming baby, then coming back to pick her up. Only after she's wiped herself out a bit will she sleep. It sucks because she's never been a screamer and she doesn't get upset about anything else. She screamed so much yesterday, I was convinced that she had an ear infection from all of last week's congestion and took her to acute care, only to be told that she was completely healthy.

Anyway, none of this is particularly important. I'm really putting this here because it bothered me that every time I come to this page, the first thing I see is the post about having to put my cat to sleep. I really ought to be going to bed. Last night I got the most sleep I've gotten in one stretch in a week and that was only four hours without interruption. Sad, isn't it, when four hours of sleep is cause for celebration? Huh.

Or not.

I had to put Cricket to sleep a couple of hours ago. She would eat, but not drink. They think she probably had cancerous tumors. They said I could wait two or three days if I wanted to, but she was losing weight so quickly and hardly able to breathe, so I asked them to do it before she got truly uncomfortable.

Back from the dead?

So, I had made an appointment to euthanize my cat after she refused to eat or drink for almost 24 hours (the statute of limitations I was given by the emergency vet - basically, if she's not eating or drinking after 24 hours, it's time to consider euthanasia or surgery). Then, as though she understood what I was doing, she began eating the tuna I left out for her and drinking the juice. She still refuses water, but will drink tuna juice or chicken broth. I think she's getting a bit dehydrated, but not as dangerously so as she was last week. I guess I'll give her another day or two and see what happens.

My weekend has pretty much been spent watching the cat for signs of imminent death and trying to get a growing infant to sleep. I think she must be on a growth spurt or something clicked in her brain again. She ate for a good three, almost four hours last night, woke for maybe 30-60 minutes, then ate for another two. I'm glad I'm no longer shy about bringing a baby to bed with us. Last night could've been a lot more uncomfortable. It doesn't help that she's got her first tooth coming already. It's one of her upper eye teeth. Go figure. Now we'll have a vampire baby.

Her four-month checkup is tomorrow. I can't wait. I used to think, "Jeez - how many doctor's appointments can I justify anyway?" I no longer care. Just like with Ragsy, it's exciting as heck to go and see how much weight they've gained, what someone else thinks of what they're up to, etc. Oh, well. Such a boring weekend, but exciting to me. So far, the only thing "major" we've done is go to lunch and Babies R Us today. Whatever. It didn't involve animal hospitalization, screaming, vomiting or snot. So I'll take it.