Boobs and Poop

A wonderful friend shared this video with me after she read  Godless  Mamma . Alain de Botton beautifully describes a world where atheists can create richer lives for themselves by stealing the best practices of the world's largest and most powerful religious organizations. 

To get through the pregnancy and maintain some semblance of comfort, I incorporated a variety of strangely soothing activities into my daily life. Some became habits and have now outlasted the pregnancy. Although I am happily not pregnant, I still do all of these things: 1. Sleep with a pillow between my legs. 2. Weep for no reason, often out of nowhere. 3. Wake up every 2-4 hours, sometimes for no apparent reason. 4. Eat at strange times of the day and night. 5. Eat cereal. 6. Forget everything. 7. Take prenatal vitamins.

Watch Katharine Hepburn discuss atheism and morality. Historically, I haven't talked much about the fact that I am an atheist because this information has always been more important to the recipient than to me. Sharing my religious beliefs in conversation typically steers the conversation in one of two directions. One is invariably an attempt to change my mind on the subject through testimony; the other is an offense I didn't intend but can nevertheless not take back. I feel a little safer sharing my beliefs in this format, and the subject of religion has been on mind. I guess it's yet another on the list of things I didn't think mattered much... until I had a baby. My attitude about religion, the mystery of the unknown and morality ( Life, the Universe and Everything so to speak) will help shape hers. So here it is for the record: I don't believe in God or any gods. For a long time, I thought that this didn't matter in my daily life. And I didn'...

I lied. I don't think I can call it a meme since the text is verbatim what's said on the show. I didn't come up with anything clever. I downloaded an app that made this so easy to do. I did it because I watched this episode of Friends the other day and searched the Internet for an existing still (like the masterpiece I've since created) and was surprised one didn't already exist. Behold:

This image is taken from this amazing article on SheKnows.com .  I am the all-powerful Oz of our household. I am the administrator, family wellness and health coordinator and master of service providers. Before baby, when I was working full-time and not breastfeeding, my husband and I split everything as 50/50 as possible. Nonetheless, we still fell into some pretty traditional habits. Hubby and I have very different standards when it comes to household cleanliness, so I've always taken on more of the domestic stuff. He is the breadwinner, always drives, always pays, opens doors and does other gentlemanly things. We used to eat out or order in most of the time, so I didn't cook a lot. He grilled about as often as I cooked. When something happened, like a leaky faucet or bug problem, we'd call the landlord. If it took a couple of days, we were both at work all the time and so it didn't matter much anyway. But now that we have a baby, and she and I are home all t...

This image is taken from an article on Mapleleafmommy.com . What a weird day. It's baby girl's 1/2 birthday - she's 6 months old today. I'm delighted. She's having a blast and we celebrated with some new toys from Target. Another interesting rite of passage befell our happy home today - I was "let go" from a job for the first time in my life. I've been wanting to write about how hard it's been to go back to work. After the events of today, I'll now write a completely different post. I'd never even come close being fired before this morning. And typically, any bad news (especially concerning my employment) is met with fear, defensiveness or confusion. But today I happily received a very clear message. There's no bitterness or self-loathing here. I did a good job, but a local person may be better suited for the work. I was working remotely and from a different time zone - and due to the nature of the work, that put me at a di...

Image taken from this article (which is riddled with misspellings but very funny). My baby's boogers are ridiculous. They're usually grayish or white, so I'm not talking about a sinus infection or anything. She just gets these giant, hard boogers on a regular basis. They're like obstructive boulders that stymie her breathing. I expend a lot of energy extracting them from her nose and studying them on a daily basis. I even call this apparent ritual our "daily booger excavation." I once called it a "daily booger extraction" but those days have long passed. It's truly an operation that requires planning, precision tools, patience, dedication and time. I'm a booger archaeologist, unearthing the remnants of a very recent past from my daughter's nasal cavities. Recently, baby girl has also taken an interest in my boogers. The other night she was struggling to sleep, so we snuggled. She settled in, stuck her finger up my nose and only...

So we dove into feeding the baby formula because I wanted to quit pumping. I have quit pumping. I'm still nursing (more and even more frequently over this past week). This is because I think we dove into the formula too quickly. Baby girl's stomach was quite upset last week, and I think it's because we started feeding her up to 4 bottles of formula each day. We didn't take the expert advice of subbing one feeding for a bottle in a progression until she's weaned. I just stopped nursing her during the day, all of a sudden. Last Wednesday, baby girl threw up all over our nanny. All over her. I washed nanny's clothes and gave her an extra outfit to wear. Within minutes of changing, baby girl threw up on her again. I called the pediatrician and he said to go back to exclusively breastfeeding until the stomach issue cleared up. So back to breastfeeding I went, and it was like starting over on so many levels! I think I had allowed my milk supply to drop a teen...