Danny mugs for the camera. 

Uma attacks a plate of spaghetti. 

Penis Circumference and Other Size Matters

Well, after devoting the second diary to my vagina and the third to Sophia’s Baby Einstein addiction, I figured it was high time little Gus got his turn in the blog spotlight.

This week we found out that Gus is the baby-sized version of Danny De Vito. He’s in the 95th percentile for weight and the 50th percentile for height. Hell, the kid even resembles De Vito. He’s dark and bald with huge jowls. And right before he attacks my nipple, I swear he even gets the same sinister glint in his eye as De Vito did every time he ate poor Latka Gravas for breakfast on Taxi.

This is, by the way, the exact opposite of his big sister, who is the baby-sized version of Uma Thurman. Soph measures in the 100th percentile for height and the 50th percentile for weight. She’s willowy, with wispy blonde hair and high check bones. And before she throws a tantrum, she gets the same sinister glint in her eye as Uma did right before slaughtering that whole amphitheater full of Kung Fu chicks in Kill Bill.

Poor Gus. At the ripe old age of 10 weeks, he’s already lost out to his big sister in the height category (Sophia was an inch taller than Gus when she was his age). Hopefully this news won’t be too damaging to his little psyche. Although, considering Soph didn’t even crawl until almost 12 months, Gus has a very good chance of kicking her ass in the crawling, walking and rolling over categories.

By the way, I’m sure 10 out of 10 pediatricians disapprove of comparing one child to the other in any height/weight/poop/pee/fart/burp categories. But if they didn’t want us to compare our kids to other kids, or our kids to one another, why worry about tacking on all the percentiles? Why are measurement stats required fields in all the baby books? Why are parents stressed about the fact that Junior only moved up two percentage points in the head circumference arena since his last checkup?

When he’s a teenager, Gus isn’t going to care one lick about where he ranked on the head circumference charts at 10 weeks. Now, where he ranked on the penis circumference charts he might eventually be interested in. Funny thing – penis circumference measurements are curiously absent from all baby books. Except one.

My dear friend Susie found the coolest baby memory book on the planet. It’s called Baby’s First Tattoo. Aside from recording baby’s first word, step and head circumference, this book also has space for “the diameter of hole baby’s head came through,” (no kidding) “baby’s first arrest,” “baby’s first DWI,” and so on.

Gus is a little too young for us to record some of these firsts, but in the spirit of the book, I thought I’d share some other funny stats for both kiddos. Here goes:

Number of pounds you helped Mommy pack on during pregnancy:

Sophia: 40
Gus: 30

Number of angry red stretch marks you drew on Mommy:

Sophia: 2
Gus: Too depressing to begin to count

Number of projectile vomiting incidents in first 8 weeks of pregnancy:

Sophia: 4
Gus: 3

Number of projectile vomiting incidents in first 8 weeks of life:

Sophia: 1
Gus: 3 or more per week

Number of times your incessant pooping caused Mommy to totally freak out and call your pediatrician at four in the morning:

Sophia: 0
Gus: 1

Number of projected therapy sessions required to help you overcome overwhelming feelings of embarrassment, anger and inferiority caused by Mommy’s self-indulgent, hideously uncool, tell-all baby blog:

Sophia: 100
Gus: 101

You go, Gus!

Crack for babies?

And this week in Diaperland …

1. Chris got his grove back (and then some).
2. Sophia got hooked on Baby Einstein.
3. Gus continued to show off his dimples and mastered sleeping through the night.

OK, I know most of you would like to be spared the details of 1, so I’ll skip right on to 2.

My beloved firstborn is already an addict at age 17 months. It started out innocently enough. We were getting rather bored with our toys, games and books. We were cranky from staying inside all day. We needed some new entertainment … oops, I mean, enrichment.

Oh, OK. Mommy needed to load the dishwasher for once without worrying about us grabbing a meat cleaver from the silverware rack and hacking our little finger off while Mommy’s back was turned for a split second. Mommy figured one little DVD couldn’t hurt. Mommy was horribly wrong.

If you’re reading this and you’re a parent whose kid is also hooked on Baby Einstein, you’re probably smiling knowingly by now. If you’re a parent who’s heard me denounce TV and then smugly tell you about Sophia’s love for reading, you’re probably eating this shit up with a gigantic spoon. If you’re a parent-to-be, take heed!

As Sophia completed her 100th lap around the living room carpet one day last week, I casually slipped Baby Newton into the DVD player (Baby Newton, if it isn’t obvious, is about geometrical shapes.) When the music cued up, she stopped in mid-step, transfixed. A multicolored caterpillar inched its way across the screen. “Bee!” Sophia called out proudly. Technically, it wasn't a bee. But it resembled one. Baby was interacting with the thing, dammit. I headed off to the kitchen to rinse dishes.

Hearing a catchy tune about shapes a few minutes later, I went into the living room to check out the action. Sophia was leaning on a chair, sucking her thumb, utterly frozen in space and time. When she saw me, she took her thumb out to blurt, “Wassat?” and pointed to a 3-D clown dancing jerkily with a 2-D triangle on screen. “It’s a clown!” I sang enthusiastically. “A clown!” she repeated happily, and promptly returned her thumb to its former position. I returned to my dishes.

Well, the video ended just as I was ready to tackle the rest of the kitchen. "So that’s what the'repeat play' option is for," I thought. I looked around my filthy kitchen, then marched back into the living room. “Shapes are ed-u-ca-tion-al!” I sang in my head as I grabbed the remote and hit repeat play.

An hour later the kitchen was spotless, Sophia still had all ten of her tiny fingers and we were back in the living room doing our thing. We read a couple books. Played ring around the rosie. All of the sudden, my Baby Einstein was pointing at the TV. “Shapes, shapes!” she cried.

“Ooooh-kaaay!” I replied. “Let’s play with these shapes.” I grabbed the new building blocks with shape cut-outs Santa brought us for Christmas. Sophia looked at me as if I’d given her a pile of razor blades and shoved the blocks away from her with disgust. “Tee-fee, tee-fee!” she wailed.

She's continued to wail and beg for tee-fee and shapes every hour on the hour since.

Before I'd ever seen it, I was against Baby Einstein. For one thing, they’re owned by Disney. Disney wasn’t satisfied with buying and bastardizing the good names of Dr. Suess and A.A. Milne, among others. No. They had to go way back to before there were copyright laws and pilfer Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare and Bach. (Not that we’re talking apples to apples here, but I don’t see a Baby Elvis, a Baby Gates or a Baby Spielberg coming to your tee-fee screen anytime soon.)

The first time I saw one of the Baby Einstein videos I was pissed. Pissed I hadn't come up with the idea myself. Any monkey with a camera could make these freaking videos! Most of them are just close-up shots of different toys spinning around. If you read the credits, you realize that some hacks with a mini DV camera probably did make them up on a rainy day – almost the entire cast and crew have the same last name!

Yeah, I knew Baby Einstein was a sham, a sappy, stupid video code-named Einstein so poor Mommy doesn't feel so guilty about plopping baby in front of it for hours on end. But I swear – I didn’t know it was crack!

Actually, Baby Einstein is more like heroin than crack. Slowly, the bright colors fade onto the screen, accompanied by the soft tinkle of the xylophone. The lights and colors spin faster and the music gets louder, simultaneously luring and lulling baby until she’s in a multimedia coma, oblivious to the real world. Then Mommy finishes her housework or bills or baby blog. The screen suddenly goes black. Baby comes crashing down. Hard.

Mommy crashes, too. As she tries to convince her screaming child that she can go for a few more hours without staring at toys on a tee-fee screen and actually play with the real things, Mommy realizes she’s become one of them – one of those lazy, disorganized, uninspired mothers who hires Disney or Nickelodeon or Baby Freakin’ Einstein to watch her kid. She’s sold out – and all for one lousy load of clean dishes.

Like the heroin addict, once she’s come down from her clean-dish high, Mommy vows never, ever to resort to Baby Einstein again. And the Baby Einstein DVD mysteriously disappears. "It's lost," Mommy says, shaking her head as baby pleads for it for the umpteenth time.

But then, days later, the laundry begins to pile up. Baby has worn the same pair of socks for two days straight. Daddy trips over the dirty diapers littering the floor next to the overstuffed Diaper Genie.

Just one more time, Mommy thinks. Just enough to get me through one load, maybe two.

Gus sleeps his way through Christmas Day. 

Sophia's Trucker Jacket 

Mommy, what's a Kegel?

Whew! What a week. I had a post-partum exam, helped host three dinner parties and halfway cleaned my house. I’m exhausted … and full. I guess I’ll have to start that diet next week.

I checked out fine at the doc’s office. After I had Sophia, I wasn’t so lucky. I had a bad tear (they said second degree, but what the hell does that mean) and apparently it wasn’t healed. Doc said he was going to put on some “medicine.” Then he asked me to do a Kegel so he could test my vaginal muscle tone. I did one. “Try again,” he said sternly. Another one. “You’re going to have to do a lot more Kegels to get back your muscle tone,” he warned.

I was completely humiliated. I’d been doing a lot of Kegels every day, but apparently it wasn’t enough. This was not good news in terms of how I might fair that night in the bedroom! I’d already made big plans with Chris for that night – our friend, Natalie, was going to baby sit so we could go out for the first time and get busy. Now, my mind was reeling with the news that my muscle tone had been shot to hell, and wasn’t likely to come back anytime soon.

I stumbled out of the office in a daze. Next thing I know, I’m in the bathroom in the hallway in terrible pain and bleeding! Whatever that “medicine” was, it hurt like getting stitched back up again after giving birth! Kegels or no Kegels, my big romantic plans were ruined.

I had a feeling that this time around I would check out OK, but I didn’t make any big plans so as not to jinx myself. I did, however, do tons of Kegels, and embark upon a massive hair removal project. It’s unbelievable how much hair can grow on the human body after weeks of neglect. When Gus was about two or three weeks old I remember realizing that I had simply forgotten to shave anything, including my armpits. I took a shower, was scrubbing myself and noticed I suddenly had armpits like Madonna’s circa 1986. How long they’d been like that, I can’t tell you. I shaved them off with some difficulty, then noticed my legs were also getting out of hand. I decided to let ‘em go until the six-weeks post partum check up so they would be nice and smooth.

Anyway, it took like an hour to get rid of all the hair that had grown – for several months in some spots. I think I went through two razors (I am, after all, ¼ Italian). It felt great – I must’ve been five pounds lighter! I felt almost on the verge of sexy, despite my stubborn tummy flab, the angry-looking stretch marks on my hips and my crazy-huge boobs. But as I was rubbing on some post-shave lotion, I made a terrible discovery: more stretch marks.

At first, I thought they were just those marks you get from sitting in one spot for too long or wearing too-tight jeans. But no. I had little stretch marks all up and down my inner thighs. Again, I can’t tell you how long they’d been there. My guess is that they’d been there from almost the beginning of my pregnancy with Gus, but I didn’t notice them – maybe they’d been hidden by all of the hair all along! Maybe I was in denial. Whenever they arrived, seeing them right before I was about to be weighed, have my vaginal muscle tone assessed and proclaimed able to have sex again was devastating to my already fragile sex-esteem.

This time around, however, the Doc didn’t test my muscle tone. He quickly proclaimed that I could have sex again without any restrictions. The whole thing was anti-climactic, except he offered to put me on the mini pill (I can’t remember now if he said micro or mini, so I’ll have to look it up). “Why the hell didn’t they give this to me after Sophia?” was my first thought, but I kept it to myself since there’s really no point in worrying about that now. Doc also gave me a referral to a Snip Doctor for Chris’ vasectomy. In a few short weeks, maybe a couple months, I can have worry-free sex for the first time in my life. Yippee!!!! Now, all I have to do is get us to want to have sex again.

Yes, it’s been almost a week since I was given the go ahead to get busy, and there’s no busy-ness in sight. It’s a weird deal. I can’t pin it down on any one thing. I don’t really care too much about the newfound stretch marks and I’m already used to dealing with the big belly.

I’m not chomping at the bit to get busy because I sort of wish the Doc would’ve checked my muscle tone. That way, I would know for sure if it wasn’t up to par. Now, there’s no way of really knowing. Chris won’t tell me the truth – no father can tell the mother of his children this type of news! It’s way worse than asking someone if they look fat in their old prom dress, let me assure you.

As for Chris, I can’t tell you exactly why he isn’t chomping at the bit. Could it be that I didn’t shower or change out of my pajamas for two days straight after my visit to the Doc Monday (hmmm…interesting psychological implications here)? Could it be that Gus sleeps a few inches away from us? Could it be that by the time we get to bed we’re so exhausted we can’t read more than a few pages in our books before falling asleep?

Let’s just say that Chris’ lack of interest isn’t necessarily comforting. Now, when we do have sex, there’s going to be all this wonder and doubt built up. Worse yet, I’m going to have to shave everything all over again!

A Very Baby New Year

It's official. I just survived the holidays with two kids in diapers and, well, it was ... wonderful. Yes, it's true. The holidays with a sixteen-month-old who’s just learned to walk and a newborn can be blissful (OK, maybe blissful is pushing it, but definitely happy).

The week of Christmas is sort of blurry, as are all weeks your first twelve weeks with a newborn. However, I managed to do all of my shopping for out-of-town family in one day and shopping for presents from Santa in about 20 minutes (including gift wrapping). I was able to scurry down to the plaza between breast feedings about a week before Christmas and pick up everything I knew I needed immediately. The rest, I bought that same evening online. Santa delivered all but one present on time. (We rock.)

This was our first Christmas in our new house and the first year we decided to stay at home rather than trekking up to Iowa. I guess it's also the first holiday with both kiddos. So, the pressure was on. I had visions of starting all sorts of lasting, cool traditions (just like they suggest in Parents magazine), of integrating my family's traditions with Chris' family customs. I dreamed of homemade pecan rolls baked fresh on Christmas morning and ten different kinds of cookies, of reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve, of hot cocoa and god knows what else (most of these dreams occurred during middle-of-the-night feedings with Gus, when I was in a semi-conscious state).

In the end, I was able to bake about two dozen sugar cookies and frost them with homemade frosting. And, of course, we had more presents and stocking stuffers than Sophia’s attention span could deal with. For our big Christmas breakfast, Chris made eggs and bacon for himself and Sophia and Gus and I feasted on microwaved oatmeal.

For Christmas dinner, we journeyed to Independence for a Christmas Extravaganza with the Huhmann family. I say extravaganza because the Huhmanns – Bill, Barbara, Brad, Karrin, Byron and Beth – showered our family with good food, extremely generous gifts and lots of love. Gus slept through the entire affair, waking only to eat. Though she received some great new toys from Grannie and Grandpa Huhmann, Sophia found one of Brad’s old doggie pull toys and spent hours “walking” it. The coolest present any of us received had to be Sophia’s trucker jacket from Uncle Brad. Brad found these insane, obscure patches online and Karrin sewed them onto this adorable jeans jacket. My favorite patch is the “triker.”

New Years weekend was actually just as busy, if not busier, than Christmas. We spent NYE at Steve Davis and Lisa Garrison’s gorgeous house in our old neighborhood. They turned their third floor into a nursery and we hired their next-door neighbor, Emma, to baby sit. Chris and I managed to eat, drink, smoke a few cigarettes (yes, bad Mama) and steal a kiss – all with only a few minor interruptions from the kiddos upstairs! Since neither of us wanted to be the DD, Ron and Alicia were kind enough to host a sleepover at their house. Amazingly, Gus slept through the entire night and didn’t wake until 9:15 the next morning!!!!

We spent New Year’s Day at Kyle and Fran’s house. They made a delicious fried turkey and we had lots of cookies and other goodies. The boys watched the Iowa game and, miraculously, they won! Fran, Payton and I played board games. I think my favorite was “Hands Down.” If you have a five-year-old, you need to check it out.

Yesterday we attended a brunch at James and Meg Hilburn’s house just a few blocks away. Meg’s house is insanely adorable – she is the second coming of Martha Stewart – only somehow less perfect which makes everything that much cooler. We had lots of yummy food and the kids were, according to Meg, the hit of the party.

As I look back over the last two weeks, I'm amazed at what we were able to do with two babies. Perhaps it isn't as hard to have two in diapers as everyone keeps warning me! I guess you'll have to read on and find out more, eh?

Today, it’s back to business. I have to write down all of the presents received and get thank yous in the mail. I need to make sure I stop eating cookies, fudge, candy etc. and get back to my high fiber, low-fat kick. I need to figure out how to join the Y. Oh, and I gotta give Gus some quality tummy time on his play gym and bathe Soph.

I also have to go to the OB for my six weeks’ check up. When I went after Sophia, it was fairly traumatizing, but more on that later.

Happy New Year, everybody!