Is My Brain Turning to Mush?

This morning we went to a family brunch to see my cousin Jason and his wife Eva’s new baby. Since they live in Fort Wayne, Ind., and we hadn’t seen little Ashlyn since she was born in November. The brunch was at Laurie and Jeff’s (my other cousin and her husband, formerly known on here as Becca and Tom when I was doing the whole pseudonym thing). So we walk in and I see all the usual faces – Laurie’s daughter Maddie, Jason’s son Jared, my parents, etc. – and there was another little girl there who I didn’t recognize.

I thought she might be a visiting friend or cousin who had spent the night, and I actually said “I don’t recognize this other little one” more than once before I realized in complete horror that it was Laurie and Jeff’s younger daughter, Annabelle. Yes, I blanked out on a little girl who I know and have seen many, many times before! I’ve heard of baby brain, but this one really was really super-awful. I was kind of freaked out that I didn’t recognize a girl who is practically my own niece!

All I can figure is that in my head, Annabelle is still more of a baby when in reality, she’s grown up quite a bit. She’s 2 and a half and whereas once she was the quiet little one who we all passed around and cooed over while her older sister Maddie took center stage, she’s developed into a real (and adorable) little girl with a big personality all her own. Yowsah. They sure do grow up fast, I guess, but it’s still not really an excuse for the total (but at least temporary) loss of my mental faculties.

In other news, we spent yesterday afternoon scoping out nursery furniture at three different stores (Rooms4Kids, Land of Nod and Babies ‘R Us) that are absolutely nowhere near each other, which is an especially great thing on a snowy, miserable February day. But you gotta do what you gotta do, and we really need to get going on this nursery thing. Our biggest challenge is that while we have the great fortune to have received a beautiful crib from Laurie and Jeff (it was most recently Annabelle’s,   as I noted in an earlier post, which makes it all the more ridiculous that I didn’t recognize her), matching the color  – a beautiful warm pine – is going to be a bit of a challenge, since most of the baby furniture they’re showing these days is either darker wood, “natural” wood, black or white.

I’ve been doing a ton of online research at just about every store in a 20-mile radius that sells baby/kid furniture and was getting really discouraged at the lack of selection in our color, but I feel better after yesterday. We found a few different options that could work, so I know we’ll at least have something. I’m still hoping to find some pieces from the original collection the crib is from – the Berg Mountain Collection – but it’s been hard to track down. Our best match color-wise was at Land of Nod, which is ideal since my aunt who works at Crate & Barrel can get us a huge discount on that stuff. But we also felt that the quality of some of the pieces we saw at the first place were better. So we’ll see. There’s still at least one more store I want to check for the Berg stuff, so we’ll see. But I felt good that we’d at least accomplished something by finding a few viable options.

After all that running around, we rewarded ourselves in typical Al fashion – with food. We went to our favorite Thai place and dug into yummy curry for dinner … ummmm …

Of Baby Brain, Nannies and other Miscellany

I locked myself in my pants today. Seriously. I was literally stuck in my khakis.

It was the rubber-band trick that got me. I figured I’d wear these non-maternity khakis since they’re one of the two pairs of pre-pregnancy pants I can still get over my butt, where apparently half of my pregnancy weight is going, and my stomach, where the other half is (more understandably) showing up.

So it’s mid-morning and I make one of my many trips to the bathroom, but instead of unwinding the rubber band from around the button of my pants I somehow keep winding it around instead, and I keep doing it until it’s so tightly wrapped around it that there’s no way I can get it untangled. I actually had to leave the bathroom and cut it off. I blamed it on baby brain, since I obviously just wasn’t thinking during what should have been a fairly mindless task.

In other (better) news, I know I wrote recently about the challenges of researching good daycare. That whole issue was made even more frightening the other day when that news story came out about the 22-year-old local daycare worker who killed an 18 month old when she literally slammed him to the floor because she was frustrated with him. How utterly horrifying is that? I know a girl who actually considered that very same place for her son, who is the same age, and she was incredibly shaken by the story. Any parent would be. I mean, it’s hard enough to send your child into a stranger’s care, but many, many families don’t have a choice but to do just that, and then you hear about something like this.

Of course, even with a nanny you aren’t completely escaping that problem. But when you’re picking a nanny, the search and interview process is much more about the person herself (or himself, I suppose, but let’s be realistic here) than about the place, which is where most of the research for daycare centers focuses. I bring up the nanny thing because the other night out of the blue, Laurie called and said she and Jeff have decided not to send their girls back to his sister for another year after all. They’re going to get a nanny instead, which puts our old idea of nanny sharing back on the table.

I’m excited about it for a lot of reasons. First, because the attention is much more personal, and the kids would be at ours or their house rather than somewhere that could be farther away. Also, they can do personalized outings, there won’t be a room full of kids who will be getting sick all the time, and the kids can all get to know their cousins (well, as much as an infant can “know” people, I suppose).

So the four of us are going to get together next Friday and talk details: how it might work, what kind of person we’d want to find, what hours we’d want them to cover, and of course, how the finances would work. We touched on this a little in our initial conversation. On one hand you could say they should pay 2/3 and we should pay 1/3 because they have two kids and we’ll have one. But one of their girls will be in kindergarten half the day. And babies demand a different level of care. But babies also spend a lot of time sleeping. And so on. The four of us have a very good relationship so I think these discussions will go smoothly, but I hope it doesn’t end up being the kind of thing that we could eventually fight about. Laurie has a very strong personality, but then, so can I. So we’ll see. Nothing’s definite, but I’m excited about it.

In other news, we had a doctors’ appointment this morning. Now that we have our fetal doppler, the excitement of hearing the baby’s heartbeat there isn’t as big of a deal, but it’s always nice to have the chance to ask the doctor my random questions. Unlike last time, when literally the only thing I could think of to ask was whether I could eat sausage, I had a small list this time:

• Were these new and changing moles I was getting normal or should I see a dermatologist? (They were fine; I’ve read in multiple places that moles can get darker or more numerous during pregnancy, but it’s always good to have them checked out).
• Were there any yoga moves I shouldn’t be doing during pregnancy? (My doctor asked if I was doing prenatal yoga classes and I said, no, just the yoga on Wii Fit. She said the poses should be fine unless they put too much pressure on my abdomen or cause me to really bear down. As far as poses that start on my back, she said I’d feel it when I shouldn’t be doing those anymore).
• Should I stop drinking my two caffeine-free Diet Cokes a day and cup or two of decaf coffee because of the artificial sweeteners in the soda and small amounts of caffeine in the coffee? (No and no).
• Was my 10-pound weight gain at 16 weeks and 5 days too much? (For now it’s fine, she said, but she added that it should start to taper off. I wonder how or why that would happen, though, since I can’t see myself starting to be less hungry…)

And that was it. The really big part of the visit came at the very end, when we scheduled our next appointment. Yes, four weeks from today, on Feb. 19, we’ll find out the answer to that eternal question: pink or blue?