More questions answered

Are you making your baby’s food? 

Not even.  I wanted to.  I thought it would be a cool thing to do, but the reality is that the only way I can imagine making his food is if I took a chunk of time on Saturday or Sunday afternoon to make a big batch, but, right now, I usually just work while baby’s sleeping which means I can get about 3-4 hours of work done each weekday which leaves me needing to work some on the weekends– during that afternoon nap where I could be making baby food.  So, we buy organic baby food– a combination of Gerber’s Organic and Earth’s Best. 

Did you pick your baby based on a picture?   

Ouch.  That one stings a little.  No, we did not pick our baby based on his cute factor, although we do think he’s cute.  But I think we’d think any baby that was ours was cute.  Isn’t that just how it works?  Anyway, the way the referral process works is that an applying adoptive family can indicate what type of child they are interested in– perhaps a gender, an age range, a specific special need, etc– and then the adoption agency matches them with a child that fits those parameters when the family’s the next one up in the queue (and when a child that fits those parameters becomes available for adoption).  In our case, we acutally learned that an agency had a baby boy who needed a family– what’s called a waiting child.  We hadn’t yet applied to adopt, but we instantly knew this was our boy and said yes.  This is how BF and I are.  The big decisions in our life have been made in an instant (we walked into the second room of our current house on the 2nd day it was for sale and I said to BF, ‘Let’s make an offer.’  We signed a completed contract for it less than 8 hours later.), and we trust our instincts.  It was another two weeks before we saw the first picture of our boy, learned his name, how old he was, or any details about him (because we needed to apply, have our home study done, and officially get approved as adoptive parents).

What does Lola think of baby? 

To borrow a line, she’s just not that into him.  She’s fine to him; she even licks him on occassion to win our praise, but, really, she’s put out with the big people in her life who have disrupted her schedule and her loving.  So she sighs dramatically. A lot.  I think Lola is going through her teen angst phase right now.  That said, baby LOVES Lola.  He thinks she is the funniest thing ever, and if she’s around, he can’t get close enough (just what Lola wants).  It’s actually quite funny.  We know the day will come when baby will start to drop food Lola wants to eat on the floor, and she won’t be able to believe her good fortune and then baby will be her favorite person in the house, but for right now, she’s just playing along with our scheme because there is no other choice.

What’s baby drinking?   

Soy formula.  And, holy cow, does it smell.  Baby spit up on his car seat the other day while BF wasn’t in the car and when BF came back he said, “who ate french fries in here?”  And you know what?  He was onto something!  Soy formula doesn’t smell like potatoes exactly, but it smells like cooking oil– like day old, used vegetable oil; like McDonald’s after closing time– and that’s why BF’s car smelled like french fries.  I told my sister this and she said, “well, probably the stuff he spit up was a day old,” which totally made me laugh.  The funny thing is that there are very few french fries that I like, and that the ones I do like are ones where the oil that’s been used is fresh.  I hate the taste of french fries that have been cooked in old oil.  And now baby’s breath totally has that old oil smell.  Poor kid.  Poor parents.

Are you still swaddling him? 

Yes we are.  And you want to see adults panic?  I should have filmed BF and I realizing the other day that our boy was getting a little too big for the Kiddopatamus.  He’s a little too wide for the straps which then keeps the swaddle part from fitting around him.  We pulled out the Snug and Tug (another swaddle blanket that we had packed up in the attic) and found we had a few more inches in circumference so we breathed a collective sigh of relief.  I also ordered something called the Miracle Blanket.  We’ll see how that works.  BF tried to put baby down the other day without his swaddle as an experiment to see if we still really needed it, and as BF put it, baby just screamed at him.  As soon as BF put the swaddle blanket on him, he fell asleep within a minute. So, yeah, we’re still swaddling him.  My friend Jen told me that Baby would not go to college with his swaddle (and that he would go to college already sleeping through the night)– this is actually good perspective to have– so we anticipate that the swaddling and the five wake-ups per night (which is a vast improvement from 15 that we are very grateful for) will end sometime in the next 17 years. 

Are you tired? 

It is so uninteresting to talk about, but, yep, we’re tired.  This is how tired I am.  My above mentioned friend Jen made me homemade granola which is one of my favorite foods of all time.  That’s the kind of friend Jen is. She makes her tired friend homemade granola.  And because I have a pain in the tail nut allergy, she made it with pistachios because those are the nuts that I can eat and then, wouldn’t you know it, my beloved pistachios have caught the eye of the FDA for possibly causing samonella.  So, Jen sadly had to tell me that she tossed the granola since it’s on the watch list, and she didn’t want to give me samonella.  My answer?  That samonella would probably land me a stay at the hospital and a stay at the hosptial would surely mean that I’d get some rest.  That’s when you know your tired. When a hospital stay sounds good.      

Any other big changes in your life?

My hair after a cut at the local barbershop (I was doing a story on the barbershop and one of the guys cut my hair with a straight razor). It's basically the cut I'm back to today.

Well, this week?  My hair’s all gone.  Six inches chopped off on Tuesday.  I didn’t even know I had six inches to chop off.  Baby was way into pulling my hair– especially when it was curly which is the easiest way to wear it right now since all I do is put a comb through it once and throw some product in it and run– and so it seemed like the easiest thing to do was get rid of the length.  That’s how it gets started, right?  You chop off 6 inches because your baby’s pulling it and then soon enough it’s all gone, right?  So, now, it touches my shoulder– or tries, too, and it’s so layered that I can’t get it back in a pony tail (not really my intention– I thought I’d still have a pony tail in my repertoire.  If I gather it at the nape of my neck, I have a little one inch nub).  No word yet on whether or not baby will find it less enticing since I’ve just had it for one day.