Comments Off

By rebecca, January 16, 2012 5:00 am

Pre-pregnancy jeans, take 3:

Image courtesy flickr.com/photos/23126594@N00/135026216/

Image courtesty flickr.com/photos/veganfeast/3925029206/

Success!

Well, my mid-section is still a little more muffiny than, say, a baguette with, er, hips and leaky breasts. (How do those French women stay so slim?) But this time — THIS TIME — I have been able to wear them for several hours and they don’t even hurt.

So either my sweet-free New Year’s resolution is yielding results or my jeans finally caved. “Hot damn, woman, you’re not trying to fit that ass in here again, are you?! Okay, stitching, we’re going to have to give a little this time.”

Either way, I seem to have developed a disturbing affinity for pastry-themed analogies.

Comments (1)

By rebecca, January 10, 2012 11:45 pm

Okay, it’s time to talk about diapering. I can hear the cheering already.

I used a diaper service (paid for by my mom) for the first few months with Colum and then switched to disposables full-time when my service ran out. (Until we were toilet training, that is. I swear by cloth trainers if you’re not too poo adverse.) With Irene I requested that my mom just buy me some diapers instead, but she really wanted me to have the service for the first couple months. So we picked out a couple dozen larger-sized prefolds at a local store. The problem was that they were too big when the service ended and then I lost all my cloth diapering mojo by the time they did fit. I think I used about half a dozen, one time. Oh god, the guilt still burns.

Pregnant the third time around, I figured there was no point even trying to kid myself. Three kids. There was no way I would be organized enough to pull off cloth this time. I was reading Amalah all summer, of course, since she just had her third kid and I needed to remember how to find the humour in sleep deprivation and spit up-drenched sheets. So, yes, I read her epic posts about cloth diapering with three kids and what works and what doesn’t and saw how cute the bums are with the diapers and the covers and everything. But nah, I wasn’t swayed. My pregnant cohort Emma Willer went out and got some cloth diapers for her third baby and I think I laughed. These women were simply better people than me and I didn’t mind saying so. I was keeping my expectations low this time and I didn’t care how many baby seals they had to club for me to do so. (What’s that? Disposables don’t come from baby seals? Oh, that’s much better.)

Fast forward three months and I’m pretty sure I lost an entire week of my life reading an internet’s worth of wisdom about cloth diapers (and don’t even ask about the Youtube videos). Before I knew it there were diapers arriving in the mail, the word “Snappi” became a regular part of my vernacular and I started cornering defenseless (and often childless) people and forcing folding demonstrations on them. And my poor brother-in-law, Sean, knows more than he ever wanted to about the antibacterial properties of properly lanolized wool. I may need a twelve step program, but at least I haven’t purchased a pack of diapers in a couple months!

I’m not sure exactly how I got from there to here, but I know it has something to do with unearthing a dozen unopened prefolds from the Irene days. I thought maybe I’d sell them or give them away, but the guilt! It burns! Money was pretty tight leading up to Christmas, too, so the idea of washing my own diapers started to shift columns from “time-consuming idealism” to “worth it to save a buck”. And of course all those cloth diaper posts I’d read were rattling around in my subconscious, quietly chipping away at my determination to do everything the easiest way possible. The final straw, however, was when I had to change Mary’s entire outfit — undershirt and all — THREE TIMES in one afternoon because of poo squishing up her back. This does not happen with cloth diapers; it just doesn’t. The poo might ooze a bit around the legs and they clearly can’t compete with disposables in terms of pure volume of pee containment, but you won’t have to deal with poo exploding up the your infants back over and over again. Screw this noise, I thought, and stuffed a giant prefold into small-sized Bummi wrap and called it a day.

Right then. Since this prelude to a small post about cloth diapering has become a long post unto itself, I’m going to have to hit you with a cliff hanger here. More details about what, how and why I cloth diaper will follow later this week. Can you even wait?!

Oh god, at this rate I won’t have any readers left by the end of the month.

Comments (7)

By rebecca, December 31, 2011 11:15 pm

Resolved:

• Lose more weight
• Write more sentences
• Make more money
• Do more dishes

I have been walking five miles a day — at least — ever since Ed returned to work after Mary’s birth. That’s five days a week for ten weeks for a grand total of 250 miles. I walk with a baby strapped to my chest and a three year old in a stroller and I walk fast. I walk fast and hard and my muscles ache and my shirt gets drenched with sweat. I walk up and down hills and have worn a hole in the heel of my left shoe. And I have not lost a single pound. NOT ONE LOUSY POUND!

So, as much as I love aching muscles and sweaty pit-stained shirts, I’m going to have to take this in another direction. From January 1st to February 10 (which is 1.5 weeks before Lent when I’ll give up something again) I’m staying away from sweets. That means no more cookies, cakes, tarts, pies, squares or anything full of empty calories that I’m tempted to grab because I haven’t had time to feed myself properly. And, in anticipation of the annual deep freeze, I’m swapping my daily walk for a thrice weekly go on my parents exercise bike. Guys, I had better lose a pound, or thirty.

My dad would always say he needed to write a sentence and then we could go to the park, the grocery store, my grandparent’s house or wherever. In fact, he still does. Because you can’t write a novel in any given moment, but you might be able to manage a sentence. I have three young kids with no child care and no housekeeper; I’m lucky if I can hammer out a blog post in one sitting. I just need to focus on using the time I do have, naps and evenings and weekends, to write one sentence at a time. I’m not working on a novel at the moment, but I may get there yet.

I was able to find the New Yorker fiction issue cover on the right thanks to the miracle of the internet. It’s from 1995, so I was just 17 when it came out, but it made a lasting impression. Here it is, New Year’s Eve, and while everyone else is partying, the writer keeps writing. I can hear my neighbours partying, their recycling bin slamming shut and laughter and music wafting, as I type. Someone once said on Twitter (and I paraphrase): If you can imagine doing anything else at all besides writing, you should go ahead and do that. If you cannot, then write.

Just one more nugget about writing as it pertains to parenthood. I had a grad student friend with an infant who said Margaret Laurence did all her writing between the hours of 10pm and 2am, after her children were asleep. My friend was lamenting her own inability to get by on so little sleep. I actually do all right burning the candle on both end, so maybe I should really considering knocking off a couple novels in the middle of the night rather than watching Law and Order reruns and tweeting shit out to my two followers in Australia. I couldn’t find a quote from Margaret Laurence talking about writing around her children, but I did find this one:  “When I say “work” I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”

I suppose it would look better for me to resolve to spend more time cuddling with my children. Or, to give more to charity. Or, to take in sick puppies. But guess what? I can’t do any of those things unless I make more money. Money, money, money, money! Being a grown up adult with a house and children and a car (omg, the car) is expensive and I really need to clock more than two or three billable hours per week. Mary’s almost four months old *sputter* and I should be able to get her settled into a more predictable nap routine. It’s time for me to hustle up more paying gigs — as many as possible — and give this professional writing thing a real go. (See above. As though you just skipped to this paragraph.)

That last one was just a joke. It’s not physically possible for me to do any more dishes than I already do. Nothing short of starting to express milk into bottles and having to make my own baby food in the near future could possibly create more dirty dishes than I already have. I’m so screwed.