Here I go again...

After an eventful 15 month hiatus, I've decided to give this mommy blogging another go.  I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post or how much (or how well) I'll write -- having two kids has proven to be a recipe for utter domestic lunacy -- but there are a few reasons I'm thinking this is a good idea:

1) I'm trying to fight Eliza's inevitable "Second Child Syndrome."  There are a lot of things that aren't...hmm...the same the second time around.  As a good friend of mine recently said of her second:  "She's basically treated like a purse, toted around as I chase after Kid #1."  The Mommy Guilt keeps pointing out the fact that Eliza sleeps in a Pack N' Play, hasn't been read "Goodnight Moon" 435 times by now, got kicked out of our room after 2 nights (not 2 months), and faces a significantly longer wait time between pooping in her diaper and getting a fresh one.  But on the plus side, her parents are way less nervous, she has an endless source of entertainment in her always-moving, always-talking big brother, and if she plays her cards right, she could probably guilt us into buying her a pony when she's 12.  But for now, writing a few blog posts about her seems like a good attempt at parity.

2) I'm almost certainly not forming any new memories right now.  The days are wild and surviving the 16 waking hours between 6:00AM and 10:00PM sucks all my brain juice out.  I often can't remember to shower or eat or brush my teeth; mentally recording the sweet (and not so sweet) moments of young motherhood is out of the question.  So years from now, when I suddenly emerge from this sleepless, spit-uppy fog, look around me and wonder how the hell I got here, there will at least be some record of the journey.

3) Blogging might be the key to my continued (quasi-)sanity.  When you keep a blog, mishaps and blunders that at the time seem totally meltdown-worthy are transformed into amusing blog fodder, automatically activating your much-needed sense of humor.  It's the well-at-least-it-will-make-for-a-good-story-later phenomenon.  Take, for example, one evening two weeks ago.  Home by myself and bathing both children during the always hectic pre-bedtime routine, I very narrowly averted a biohazardous disaster.  I'd just taken Eliza out of the bath when -- for the first time ever -- Owen pooped in the tub.  Like gross, crumbly, spread-before-I-could-catch-it poop.  With two wailing kids and an uncontainable poopfest on my hands, I almost threw my hands up and cried with them.  But I stepped back, thought about how completely silly the situation was, [called my mom and asked her what the hell to do with a tub full of shit], and realized that maybe I should restart the blog.

So here I go again.  Hope to see you back here soon.

Looking for Trouble

Before I started [sporadically] writing again this summer, I predicted that my blogging would be cut short by the start of classes or Owen's walking.  The latter, as I posted several weeks ago, has begun.  And oh my, how life has changed.

People warned me that this would happen.  Seasoned moms laughed knowingly as they foreshadowed the end of downtime as I knew it.  But in a state of near-pathological denial, I shook my head, said that couldn't be true.  I rationalized that Owen was already all over the place as a crawler, and how different could walking really be?

The answer: completely, unrecognizably, turn-everything-on-its-head, suck-every-ounce-of-energy-out-of-your-bones different.

With the newfound physical skill, there came an unanticipated mental shift, a sudden bolus dose of independence.  Where Crawling Owen got into everything within a 10 foot radius of where we were playing, Walking Owen prefers to dash into other rooms -- a lone hunter in search of trouble -- and rediscover whatever toilet or closet or cabinet he was most recently pulled away from.  This morning after one such episode, he looked me in the eye, flashed a sweet smile of mischief, and shook his head "no" as he tried to topple a floor lamp.

At least we know he has a sense of humor.

Lethal Combination

Some things just don't belong together.  Oil and water.  Square pegs and round holes.  Tom and Katie.  New teeth and new walkers.

I'm not sure what in our evolutionary history would've selected for teeth to sprout at approximately the same time as walking begins.  It seems like something akin to running with scissors, only the scissors are actually implanted in your mouth.  When you're face-planting every tenth step, teeth are a real occupational hazard.  Not to mention the danger to the poor teeth themselves.  I now look at 3- and 4-year-old children with a sense of absolute amazement that they have a fully intact set of choppers.  

Thanks to the single snaggletooth protruding from his top gums, Owen has had three fat lips in three days.  During the last fall, Aaron and I actually came to terms with the fact that Owen might've knocked out his one and only pearly white, before the blood cleared and we could verify that the tooth was, in fact, still there.  

Maybe new teeth aren't only there to wreak senseless havoc on new walkers; maybe like spurs on a horse, they're meant to serve as a moderately painful incentive to start moving the right way.  Whatever the case, I'll put one in the win column if we can make it to preschool with an intact mouthful of teeth.

(Side note:  if you're thinking, "Hmm, it's weird that Owen only has one tooth at nearly ten months," you would be right.  The average age for tooth-growing is 4-8 months, and his first clocked in at 9.5 months.  He actually took his first steps before he had a single tooth in that little mouth.)

Transitioning from "has walked" to "is walking"

The latest iteration of Owen's dance moves

(Warning: do not watch more than once.  This song will haunt your dreams.)

Happy Fifth of July

Baby Steps

Last week, Owen "officially" walked for the first time.  I use the term loosely because it's nearly impossible to say what counts as "The First."  We've spent plenty of time watching him put one foot in front of the other in a walk-like fashion, but launching himself from Point A and toppling clumsily into Point B hardly seemed like a walk.  Or at least not the kind of walk I'd wish for him long-term.

No, all prior walks too closely resembled the gait of a drunken sailor.  But something finally seemed to click, and now the drunken sailor is sobering up and taking more purposeful, confident strides.  And yet if asked, I would say Owen "has walked" but I wouldn't say he "is walking."  Oh, the nuanced verb tenses of parenthood... 

Before becoming a mom, I imagined there would be one magical point in time when -- *presto* -- the kid would evolve from an all-fours crawler to a bona fide baby erectus.  Or one day when baby babble would suddenly transform into intelligible speech that required no parental translation.  Or one night when infants learned to love sleep as much as their parents and would stay down, uninterrupted, through the night for ever more.  To my former non-mom self, I say simply: you were a serious idiot. 

Now I know better.  Nothing about this child-rearing adventure is so clearly black and white.  Life does not progress linearly.  Things move forward and then revert, they ebb and they flow.  You take two steps forward and then crawl all the way back to where you started.  One day the kid learns to love carrots, and the next day he learns how to send them flying across the kitchen.  But really, the times when Owen propels himself haphazardly from one piece of furniture to another -- completely disregarding the fact that he doesn't yet know how to walk -- are way more fun to watch than boring old big-person steps.  

The real delight of parenthood comes less from reaching milestones and more from appreciating the path that exists in between them.  It comes from observing -- with loving patience and a healthy sense of humor -- as a Mini Person learns all about the world around him.  The joy, as they say, is in the journey, and what an entertaining journey it is.

Updates from my perch on the couch

Well, I made it out alive. Can't say the same for my boobs.

Five hours and two surgeons later, the mastectomy was successfully completed.  In the spirit of over-sharing, I had to get expanders put in -- my wish for same-day reconstruction was thwarted by uncooperative skin -- and I'll have to have a second surgery sometime in September.  So if you see me a few weeks apart and think to yourself, "Holy smokes, her chest seems to magically double in cup-size every time I see her," you'll basically be right.  Except it won't be magic; it will be 60 CC's of injected saline every Monday morning around 10:00.

The day-to-day recovery has been made possible by a doting husband, a mom who relocated to Boston for a month, and a healthy ingestion of painkillers.  As expected, the hardest part of it all has been not being able to lift Owen.  As I lay low in my pajamas, hair in a messy side ponytail, wearing in a butt-sized indentation on the couch, he must think Mama turned into a huge slacker.  He looks at me expectantly when he wants to be held, and doesn't understand why mealtimes/baths/diaper changes/getting dressed/being rocked to sleep have all been outsourced to Daddy and Grandma.  But hopefully in another 2.5 weeks, I'll be given the okay by the plastic surgeon to resume my beloved mommy duties and life will look a little more normal.

Eight months vs. nine months

On the Friday before my surgery, Julette (Owen's nanny/my "co-mom") and her awesome daughter, Rheanna (right), threw me a little surprise party.  Nanny friends and Owen's playmates came along, too.  Too, too sweet.

Disclaimer: Not Funny

I had a long internal debate about whether to mention this here -- this is Baby Spam and not Katie Spam, after all -- but I realized that the story of my first year of motherhood would be incomplete without it.  So here goes...

As many/most/all of you know, on Monday morning (June 11) I'll be having a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy at Mass General.  The key word is prophylactic: I have no active disease, just the credible threat of one.  Thanks to the BRCA1 gene mutation that seems to overstay its welcome, generation after generation, I am one of the way-too-many women in my family that faces an 80% (but in our case, closer to 100%) chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer.  I am profoundly grateful that I have the chance to act preemptively where so many did not; however, right now that fact doesn't seem to be making this process any less daunting. 

My most immediate fears are about the physical aspect.  I’m scared of the recovery process.  I’m fearful of needles and pain medicine and stitches and drains and swelling and loss of motion and chronic discomfort.  I’m dreading that first look in the mirror, facing an alien body.  But more than that, I’m unbearably sad at the thought of not being able to hold my precious son close to my chest and rock him to sleep.  I’m devastated that, for a time, I’ll be unable to lift him and cuddle him close and be his normal old mommy.  I feel, already, the sense of loss awaiting me when his unborn siblings arrive and cannot take their rightful place at my breast after their hard-won entry into this world.   

But Owen needs his Mama more than Mama needs her boobies.

So I will dutifully sacrifice two healthy body parts to reduce the risk of my children being left motherless, my husband being left a widower, and my own body being left ravaged by the brutality of cancer treatments. Empowered -- by information, access to world-class healthcare, the support of family and friends -- I will cut my risk of breast cancer from near-certainty to near-zero. I know this disease all too well -- the surgeries and chemo and radiation and bone marrow transplants -- and those things simply do not have a welcome place in my family's future.

So there ya have it. Hopefully I'll be back in no time, writing about my devious schemes to get Owen to crawl around the house after me (since I can't lift him) and get Aaron to make cookie deliveries to the couch (since I can't lift myself).  It's game time. See you in a week or so. And if my first few posts are a little incoherent, blame the drugs.

Cherishing all my mommy cuddles