Grand Cayman or bust

The wind chill outside is currently in the single digits. In March. In Washington DC. Yet there is hope on the horizon, in the form of an anniversary getaway.

We've spent our last two anniversaries in New Orleans, as you might remember. It's one of my favorite cities in the world, and there's something about the vibe there that just speaks to us. Strolling the streets hand in hand, music in the air, our bellies either full of delicious food or on the way to eat more delicious food... my kind of city in every way. This year, though, with baby in tow, New Orleans just didn't feel right. We also really wanted to get away, to take real time off (unlike our usual long weekends), to celebrate each other but also our little gal, and to go someplace new. Here's what we settled on:

Yes please.

We've rented a condo at Grand Cayman Island for a week in May. A week! T and I have actually never been to the Caribbean together, so it'll be new for all of us. H will turn six months old while we're there, and I practically squeal when I think about her baby toes in the Caribbean. I'm also excited that we have a condo instead of a hotel room to help create more of a "home away from home" atmosphere. Other good things: having a washer and dryer, having baby furniture already there, and being able to toast English muffins for breakfast instead of having to order $30 omelets every day. (Ever practical over here!)

We've booked a direct flight and to T's chagrin, I've placed us in the very back row of the plane to hopefully limit the annoyance factor if she's fussy. Fingers crossed!

For those of you who've taken your wee ones on beach trips, do you have any recommendations that were vacation-savers on the beach or in the pool together? We'll obviously be taking swimsuits, rash guards, and hats, but what am I missing? I have my eyes on a tented pool float that packs flat, for one. Anything else? Flat-packed beach tent? Oh, and what's your favorite baby sunblock?

Now excuse me while I stare at those palm trees the rest of the afternoon.

Snow days

Here in the winter that never ends, we're trying to maintain a sense of humor. Although yet another snow dump is certainly testing the patience of everyone, I keep a couple of things in mind:

• This isn't anywhere as bad as my freshman year of college in Boston, when I was naïve enough to believe that spring actually existed in New England and then suffered through an April Fool's Day blizzard (followed promptly by an "I must see green immediately" trip back home to North Carolina, of course).
• Even though I literally pay for the privilege of skipping work to stay home snuggled in with H due our nanny contract's coverage of snow days (standard procedure here - in any other year it would be a complete non-issue!), it's still pretty awesome. (Our nanny is fabulous, by the way. Not complaining!)

I find myself cooking a lot when the family is snowed in together. And playing with (store-bought) flowers. Last time, two batches of cookies, a salted caramel pie, and a big pot of chili. This time, a big pot of soup, some fresh, oh-so-spring-green chive oil to garnish anything and everything, decadent baked oatmeal, and a couple of kick-ass dinners. Something about seeing white outside makes me immediately want to fire up the stove.

Mostly, though, I laugh a lot with our little gal, who manages to squeeze more personality into her 14-lb frame than I ever thought possible.

I really didn't know that babies could have this much personality. I think that's been the best part of this whole parenthood thing... this girl makes it so much fun.

We set up a swing in our crazy floor-to-ceiling windows, which is hilarious both from the inside and outside. Cue the "baby in a window" jokes. We already stop pedestrians in their tracks when the pets are sunning themselves in these - by the time we warm up a bit and the weekend rolls around, I expect crowds out on the sidewalk smiling at the roly poly grinning machine doing her thing for all to see.

Life is really good these days. I mean, look at this little creature. Even when she's the Hungry Hippo or having an off day, I swear she's a total delight. I sort of feel like I did when I was pregnant, waiting for the awful shoe people talk about to drop. My "maybe I'll feel like crap during the third trimester" has become "maybe this will become awful when she's teething." Time will tell. (I never did feel awful when pregnant - I know it's weird how much I loved it. Except for the swollen feet at the end!)

We're two nights in with H sleeping in her crib, by the way - woo hoo! Everyone's making progress but you, weather. Everyone but you.

1-2-3

I knew it would happen this way, that I'd look up and have a three and half month old and be back at work for so long it's like I never left. That's a good thing, in my mind. Time is flying, but it's great. It's more of a balancing act than ever, but I've always been pretty decent on the tightrope. I think the years leading up to now were so full of angst at times, that actually being a parent, after all it took to get here? Not stressing me out. Still grateful.

I mean, this kid!

She's sort of a tank, and she's a grinning fool, and she's ridiculously adorable. Pastimes include hanging out watching us cook dinner, talking to herself, wanting us to "stand" her up, smiling, and eating. That's H in a nutshell these days.

On the eating: this girl of ours can eat. She's downing 18-25 ounces of milk just while I'm at work. Our nanny says she's never seen anything like it. Somehow, someway, I'm keeping up with her with the pumping. Today I realized my allergy meds have recently decreased my supply a bit, so I think I can get back on top of her appetite a little now that I've stopped the Zyrtec. I hope so, because the freezer stash is gone, so I'm on the hook. Never fear: I'm already all over the fenugreek, oats, and special tea.

She's becoming a good little sleeper, thankfully. Lately we've been moving her bassinet ever so slowly away from our bed, down the hall, and into her room. This will be her third night in the bassinet in her bedroom. We can usually depend on her to sleep from 10ish to 5ish, which works pretty well since that's when T wakes up, too. Of course, last night she randomly woke up to eat at 2:30, so we're far from 100%. But I feel good about where we are and how she's doing.

I was talking to a favorite friend tonight and saying that I wish I'd taken time to blog about more of this transition - about H being breech for a while, about our birth story, about all the moments leading up to now. This is why Instagram exists, I suppose - helping harried folks like myself snap moments to remember when there's just no time or brain power for paragraphs.

I'm getting back into the swing of things, though - I can feel it. (Hell, I'm wearing workout clothes as I type and just marked an X on a brand new Calendar of Shame - remember that?) More to come. I really want my little corner of the world here to stay alive, even if just a little bit.

Three things

1. Jimmy Fallon continues to dominate; The Boss continues to rock; Chris Christie continues to fail; I continue to be amused.



2. These 1920s mug shots are… hot. What's going on here? Whatever it is, I'm a buyer.

3. Babies in letter sweaters are as cute as you might have suspected. Even better, this one is 30 years old. T was a proud dad at the Yale-Harvard game at Madison Square Garden. Baby H getting in her first hockey game at eight weeks… yeah, he's a proud dad.

Recent favorites

Some favorites boppin' around my world lately:

This song. I could listen to it endlessly. It's been months, and it's still on heavy rotation over here.



This show. 

Man, am I hooked. I started Season 1 Episode 1 while nursing H one day, thinking it'd be a casual fling I'd have over maternity leave. By Episode 3 I was calling in T so he could join the fun. Marathons being what they are, we finished the entire series a week ago. So there we were, halfway through Season 3, ready for new January episodes… and it's not coming back until the end of February?! What are two hopeless addicts to do?

(Answer: House of Cards, Season 2, starting February 1.)


This sketch. Because there's simply nothing funnier on the internet to me right now, weeks after my original guffaw. (Confession: this ditty actually gets stuck in my head worse than the aforementioned actual song that I love.)



This photo. There's not a shot in the world that's ever made me happier… and the competition is pretty fierce.

In the morning we're heading up to New York to meet T's family for a big hockey game. My baby daddy's excitement at taking H to her first college hockey game is adorable - a tiny letter sweater is involved. There will be photos. 

On Monday I'm back at the office, and I feel good about that. I miss work. I know I'm heading back earlier than a lot of people do, and I'm partially complicit in that, thanks to the demands of my pet project. The other part of it is, you know, this. I'm nervous only about how well daytime pumping will go and if I can keep with her. The rest is, well, the stuff of life. I'm sort of ready to get that going already, you know? 

Six weeks of wonder

In the blink of an eye, Hazel is six weeks old, Christmas is behind us, and it's already 2014. It's hard to believe how quickly the days are moving by, and yet I can hardly remember life before her. She's... awesome. Obviously I find everything she does to be miraculous. Every day I look at her and marvel that T and I (with the help of some awesome science-doctors, of course) created something so amazing. I can't wait to see what she becomes.

My favorite thing in the early days was feeling like somehow I already knew her. Maybe that's just what happens when you bring someone who's half you into the world. She was born and entirely new, and somehow instantly familiar, like she'd been with me all along.

Most people think she looks like me, but I do think she has her dad's expressions, and his legs. So far it appears that we lucked out in the lottery of baby temperament. She's almost always pretty mellow and happy. At first all she wanted to do was snuggle. These days she enjoys sitting upright and looking around the room, especially at sunshine. And her newest trick is seeing not just the morning sun, but us. When her big eyes actually lock with ours, I melt in a major way. And don't even get me started on her smiles... I'm sure she already thinks we're pretty lame, the way we embarrassingly fawn over her.

When she's not mellow and happy, we call her Hazel the Hippo - a fiery beast who demands food at any cost. The hippo gets what the hippo wants. (And hey, I get hangry, too, so I can't blame her.) She loves baths, which makes me hopeful for a future water girl. She runs hot like her mom, waking up at night sweaty and wanting to shed layers. Speaking of nighttime, at six weeks she's normally waking up once a night at 3 or 4 in the morning. Usually ten minutes of milk and she's back to sleep until a reasonable hour. There are certainly bad nights here and there (and a few in a row when she had her first cold, poor thing), but we really do feel lucky with our mellow babe. Her parents are pretty mellow too, so her attitude fits right in. She's a huge eater, also like her parents. Her birth weight was 8 lbs 2 oz, and on Christmas Eve she was already up to 10 lbs 10 oz. My body's keeping up with her, which I'm so happy about. Keeping a little one nourished and full is no small task.

Staying home with her has been both rewarding and challenging. By the time I was feeling strong again and was home alone, I began to feel like I wasn't doing enough during the day. As we know, I tend to have a few too many pots on the stove at once, so having just one task in front of me was new. So there I was, stalking my work twitter feed in between feedings and going through work emails. Although the job in front of me is arguably the most important there is, the feeling that I wasn't contributing to society was hard to handle. T would remind me that my contribution at home those first weeks was even bigger, but working solo for my person instead of the people are two very different things. The timing of my maternity leave was sort of a professional nightmare due to the timing of a large project milestone at work, and until we reached our goal I wasn't able to let go very well. I couldn't stay away, didn't want to. The last two years of my professional life led to a single night in December, and I had to be part of it. Baby H was part of the festivities too, of course. She's our project's Infant Ambassador - lots of important duties with that title!

Once my project's year-end milestone passed, I was able to relax and let go of work a little more. I decorated for Christmas without many email checks, and went home for the holidays without "work brain" for the first time in ages. H met her crazy crew of cousins - she is number five - and we all spoiled each other. Good stuff, all of it.

Now here we are, in a new year. Our dear friends and their two-year-old traveled here to usher it in with us. I go back to work in two weeks… time is flying. I want H to grow up knowing that her mom is doing work that fulfills her and that she thinks is important - not going back to work wasn't a consideration for me. I think the best example I can make for her is to do work that means something to me. We're all happier when I feel like I'm contributing toward something bigger than myself.

The hippo is starting to come out beside me, so there's time for just two more photos. Here's H's birth announcement:

I adore her serious, thoughtful eyes in this photo (we had a mother-daughter photo shoot one afternoon on the sheepskin rug). But because she's already changed so much since that photo - and learned to smile since then! - let's end with a happy little lady in her purple leisure suit:

Wow she is cute.

Hazel Mae is here!

Our daughter Hazel Mae came into the world Monday evening, hungry and full of things to say. She's pretty perfect, and we've never been more in love.

We brought her home in the dress I was brought home from the hospital wearing... how perfect is that? My mom took care of it all these years. My sister and niece wore it, too, so Hazel's carrying forward an important tradition.

I'll be back with more details soon, but for now, we're going to keep getting to know each other. Yawning, stretching, snoozing... all that good stuff.

In the meantime, here's the last photo taken of us as a couple, before parenthood. It's from our DC "UnShower," which my friend Nole highlighted online here and here. She and Sara knocked out some amazing details for the party, and we had such a good time celebrating Baby H with friends before she came into the world.

Now that our girl is here, life feels so, so good. Be back soon... I'm off to soak in more of this goodness.

xoxo

Almost there

This thing is almost over, kids! CRAZY.

I forgot the 37 week photo. Slacker. But here we go anyway:

Pregnancy still feels like a pretty miraculous thing. I went into it refusing to complain very much, since this is literally a privilege that we paid handsomely for, but I've found that I don't really have much to complain about anyway. Do I miss my old feet and ankles, being able to pee like a normal person, and bend over without grunting? Yes! But are these things pretty damn small in the scheme of what we're doing? Absolutely. I'm 25 pounds heavier with happiness, and it feels great.

 

Here's our singular pregnancy drama so far: Baby H hung out for at least a few weeks in the breech position. She was head-down for our 33-week appointment, but that Saturday we were in North Carolina for a family party and my mom surprised me with a "4D" ultrasound tech coming over to the house, who promptly showed us that H was hanging out upright. Eeeek. We spent the next few weeks trying to get her to turn with everything we could throw at her: acupuncture, moxibustion, temperature extremes, light treatment, and a chiropractor. Who knows what worked, but something did... she flipped about a month later at 37 weeks, a few days before we'd scheduled an "external version," or manual manipulation to try and flip her by hand.

 

I'm so relieved that she's head-down now (confirmed again this morning at our 38-week appointment!), but I'm also happy that I have the kind of birthing team by my side that would have let me try to have her vaginally even if she was breech. Natural delivery of breech babies is becoming a lost art, but our midwifery practice is extremely proud of their breech births. As long as I was progressing normally during labor, they were committed to helping me have a vaginal birth if that's what I wanted. Our practice delivers on the L&D floor right alongside OBs, so the risks are small and we're in great hands should anything more than their own expertise be needed. We're back in the camp of normal low-risk births now, and I'm thrilled, but knowing that the other side didn't necessarily have to involve surgery was comfort when I needed it.

 

So here we are... 38 weeks, belly full of an extremely active baby that wriggles a lot but seems cool hanging upside down for a while, and so much excitement about what's ahead. She is ALMOST HERE!

Maternity Photos

Also on the vacation agenda, besides the swimming and sunning and reading: maternity photos. As long as it took us to get there, there we are... pregnant. For real. It still hits me in waves sometimes, that this is actually happening.

Photos by Brooke Mayo Photography, at the Sanderling in the Outer Banks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breathing deep, pelican-style

I know. I know. It's bad.

I remember last year when my dear friend Mikaela was visiting and we were sitting at the table talking about the grand balancing act of life. "What do you let slide?," she asked. "What's the thing you let go to make the rest of it work?" At the time, I was still valiantly doing (or trying) 100% of everything at a little less than 100% - a juggler extraordinaire. Fast-forward a year later to third trimester me, working her butt off more than ever before, and I know in a second what my answer is: what I let slide is this. The blog, the creative release, the connections outside of my daily world. And I hate it, but sometimes, something's gotta give. Sometimes getting through the day takes every single ounce of what you have. Those aren't bad days, don't misunderstand me. Just very full ones, squeezed into very full weeks, squeezed into very full months.

So let's backtrack a bit, to that vacation we took that one time.

It was grand.

Some time ago I decided that the pelican is my spirit animal. Keep in mind that back in college I remember a discussion with my best gals where we voted me the lioness. So how does a lioness become a pelican? For one, she gets really tired. But what she really does is prioritize peace and quiet and relaxation above all else - above the hunt, above the kill, above the self-satisfied licking of chops. Pelicans have it going on.

The day is this: soaring above the water, sometimes alone, sometimes in a pack, sometimes with a partner. Diving in for food. Floating around. Soaring again. Water, wind, sun, air. Soaring. Diving. Floating. Repeat.

Doesn't that sound pretty magical? I'm pretty sure it's my life goal.

So on our return to our wedding locale, I spent a lot of time sitting and watching pelicans. And it made me so, so happy.



Beach. Pool. Read. Swim. Relax. Sun. Just what I needed at 28 weeks pregnant.

 

We were out swimming one day and the most miraculous thing happened. We were in the ocean fairly deep, and the water was just glittering with sunshine all around us. Suddenly, maybe 20 yards away, an enormous ray leapt out of the water, flapped its wings, and dove back in. I'd never seen one before. The wingspan was at least six feet wide, and it was miraculous. And right there.

I'm such an ocean girl, and I think Baby H might be, too. I hope she is, anyway. I love the thought of teaching her the fine art of beach lounging, the fun of wave-bopping, and the magic of breathing in that air. I hope she feels the same way about the Outer Banks that I do.

We took that vacation too late, and I swear we needed another one immediately after, but the important thing is that we got it in at all. No small feat these days.