Real talk

Real Talk: Just one day a week

To preface this post, my mother watches Lazy Baby while Mr. LL and I are at our day jobs. She comes around 8 every morning and leaves when Mr. LL gets home (he’s usually home anywhere between 4:30 and 5 in the evening). When I was pregnant, I didn’t want to assume or impose upon my mom, who was already dealing with her mother-in-law who has her own health issues that need to be dealt with, by asking her to take on this task. However, over last Thanksgiving, when I was talking about my hunt/research into daycares my mother stopped me right there and declared herself “daycare” and that was that.

Since coming back to work, things have been working out. My mom will need the occasional morning/long lunch/afternoon for doctor’s appointments and for the most part, I’m able to accommodate. However, the bigger Lazy Baby gets, the harder it is getting for my mom to handle the day to day of it all. We are at that awkward part where she ways a ton and isn’t mobile, so it puts a strain on even Mr. LL who carries 400 lb. water heaters on a regular basis.

So, last week, my mom asked if she could have one day off a week. A day where she could schedule appointments and to just, ya know, not carry a giant baby around I guess. I completely understand, and she is doing us such a HUGE service by taking the burden of childcare off our plates, that I want to be able to accommodate this request. I asked around for people who watch kids, contacted a couple (one was asking for WAY too much for us to be able to afford and the other is pretty busy), and I even called a couple of daycares (only to discover that all state accredited daycares have to assign a crib to a baby and no other baby can sleep in it – in other words, they weren’t going to do a one-day a week deal with me). I thought about asking my work if I could four days a week for 10 hours a day, even though the thought of not seeing my baby at all those four days breaks my heart (she’d be in bed, more than likely, by the time I would get home).

It kept me up a couple of nights. Mr. LL had a suggestion for someone close to our family but I don’t feel like this person would treat Lazy Baby the way I want her to be raised (not that this person would hurt her in anyway or anything like that, she just has a very different personality and is very strong willed). Him stressing the fact that we really can’t afford outside care and suggesting that this person was “our only option” didn’t help my anxiety.

I did come up with a temporary solution; I spoke to my boss about it, and we marked out a 2-5 days each month so my mom could pick one day a month to have off (aside from the usual holidays and etc.) and I would just use a vacation day that day. I’ve been at my current job for just over 10 years now, so I have a lot of vacation time and Mr. LL doesn’t have as much so I usually have random days I have to take here and there anyway. I know this is just a bandage on the situation, but maybe it will buy us some time to figure out a solution to this problem.


Real Talk: The Day to Day

 
102317-RealTalk-LazyLadyLife.jpg
 

First, I just want to thank every one who took the reader survey last week! I’m going to keep in up through this week, so if you haven’t taken it yet, I suggest you get your votes in now! It will be going down next Monday.

I wanted to do a Real Talk post just catching up on how things have been since the arrival of Lazy Baby. It has been a HUGE adjustment, but I knew it was going to be one. I’ve been really trying to find a good balance between work/motherhood/life/blogging/sleeping and tbh blogging fell pretty low on that list when all was said and done. However, I’m starting to get a bit more settled and into some kind of routines, which is a term I am using very loosely, so I feel like I can start wading back into the blogging pool.

I’m definitely going to be upping the affiliate game on the blog because having a baby is expensive. Pre-baby, I was getting burned out on affiliate posts and thought about working them off the site; post-baby and I’m trying save every penny and hustle every dime. Besides, affiliate links don’t cost you, dear reader, anything. My content is still free and if you happen to buy something using an affiliate link then I get a few pennies. (Comment below if you would like a more in-depth post about affiliate programs and how they work).

My days went from lazy to feeling like I can’t do enough after LB (Lazy Baby). As where before, I’d do the dishes in rotation with Mr. LL and same with the laundry, I’ve more or less started to do those during the week and Mr. LL gets them (for the most part) on the weekend. Here’s a look at my typical day during the week:

  • 6:30 am - LB wakes up (if she hasn’t already :/ ); I get up and heat up her bottle, then change her diaper and pass her off to Mr. LL (who has hopefully gotten up by this point–otherwise I badger him till he’s up and able to take the baby).
  • 6:45 am - Get the coffee pot going while I make lunches for Mr. LL and myself.
  • 7:15 am - Do the dishes from the night before.
  • 7:30 am - Take a moment to enjoy some coffee/help Mr. LL find everything as he runs out the door to go to work.
  • 7:45 am - Make all the bottles for the day (LB is only drinking formula these days).
  • 7:50 am - My mom shows up to watch LB. Talk to her for a bit and help her get LB set-up in the highchair for breakfast.
  • 8 am - Get ready for work. 
  • 8:30 am - Out the door and off to work.
  • 9 am - 5:30pm - Work. Sometimes I have to stay later or I get leave a little early, it just depends on the day and the workload.
  • 6 pm - Get home and immediately go change clothes. Then I’ll take LB from Mr. LL (who got home around 4:30/5pm) and play with her until it’s her dinner time.
  • 6:30 pm - Either Mr. LL or I will feed her whatever purée she’s currently enjoying, then trade off and the other will feed her a bottle.
  • 7 pm - Say “night night” to daddy, and I take LB into our bedroom–which we are still sharing with LB–and change her into her pajamas. Then we sit on the bed and read a book together and we cuddle till she starts to fall/falls asleep. I put her in her crib and pray that she stays asleep for the night.
  • 7:30 pm - During the time I’ve spent playing with LB and putting her to bed, usually Mr. LL has made dinner, so we eat now. We’ll have the monitor on and spend the next few hours hanging out, talking, watching a show or two and unwinding.
  • 10:30-11:30 pm - Momma goes to bed. Mr. LL will sometimes stay up playing a video game, but I’m usually out. Oh and before bed, Mr. LL will wash any dirty bottles still hanging around and make a bottle so it is ready in the fridge for me to grab in the morning. 
  • During the night - Some nights LB sleeps through, but lately she’s started getting up again, two or three times. Sometimes I can just pat her on the back and she falls asleep, other times, I have to put her in the bed and she EVENTUALLY falls back asleep for awhile. The latter is usually when she gets up somewhere between 4:30-5 in the morning and I am NOT about to get up and start the day then. So I let her snuggle up with us for another hour or so.

So yeah, as you can see I’m not left with a ton of free time to blog. The weekends are spent cleaning the house, grocery shopping, recharging and, more recently, taking LB on outings. This past weekend we took her to a nearby park/bird sanctuary. She really lit up seeing all those birds. It was going to rain soon, we only had about an hour and she stayed in the stroller the whole time. Hopefully we can plan better and maybe have a picnic or something out there on a sunny day.

That’s about it for me right now. I’m going to be trying to post more regularly, but it may be a minute before I find my groove again, so please be patient. Also, I’ll be doing some design tweaks here and there, but nothing too intrusive.

TTYL!

 

Real Talk: The Untold Truths About Pregnancy

 
 

There are some parts of pregnancy that main stream media doesn’t share. Even though Mr. LL and I were sorta trying to get pregnant for most of 2016, I wasn’t doing anything different to prepare my body and all that jazz. The only thing I did differently was to stop taking birth control. So, I wasn’t reading about pregnancy and fertility and parenthood because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Mr. LL and I agreed that if we got pregnant that was amazing, but if it didn’t happen we weren’t going to force it (with fertility treatments or adoption). Obviously it worked out, but I wasn’t prepared for the reality of pregnancy.

So, if you are like pre-pregnancy me and you aren’t pregnant, you probably won’t read this post and that’s fine. If you are at all curious about the REALITY of pregnancy I suggest you read on so you can at least know what you are getting into. If you are already a mom, then maybe you can get some amusement out of my journey and discovers and look back on your own experiences. If you are a dude, I hope you will read on just to get some perspective of what ladies go through when they choose this path in life. With all that said, let’s get to the good stuff.


talk.png

YOU LOSE YOUR ABILITY TO USE WORDS GOOD

About mid-way through your second trimester (around weeks 18-20) you will probably feel something that is called “the flutters.” This is when you start to feel your baby moving around because he/she is getting bigger and so you are able to feel the movements against your insides. However, these early movements are the HARDEST thing in the world to explain. Mothers and other mothers-to-be who are at/beyond this point are able to speak gibberish to one another, describing this sensation and understand completely. Trying relaying this feeling to your partner and they will look at you as if you started talking like an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon. These movements are subtle and, I suspect, feel a bit different for everyone. However, you mom-senses somehow know what it is…most of the time.


YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM WILL BETRAY YOU

In the mid to late second trimester, there were days when I couldn’t tell if it is gas or baby moving until it is too late. During this time, you are just starting to really feel the baby but sometimes it is actually gas. Gas you have NO control over. You can try and restrain it, but it’s coming and you need to make sure you are not going to cause an epidemic in your workplace by unleashing an ungodly odor amongst your colleagues.

Also around this time, I began a new existence as a woman made of acid. Pre-pregnancy, I was diagnosed with chronic acid reflux as well as bile reflux. I’ve been taking medications for both for years now, along with changing up my diet (I miss you, pineapple!) and it’s been pretty manageable. That is until I got pregnant. My bile reflux kicked in HARD and my acid reflux began torturing me again. If this is turns out to be my mutant power, I’m going to be pissed. Now, granted, I had become pretty lax in taking my medications because I had it mostly under control without them, but I started to retake my bile reflux chalk pill before bed and I would still wake up 30 mins after falling asleep to the startling sensation of bile creeping up my throat. After an hour of coughing and clearing my throat, if I was “lucky” enough to catch it before it burned my throat to the point of tears and vomiting, I would go back to sleep but I had to do so sitting pretty much straight up. I’d get a few more hours of sleep, but inevitably at some point my body would decide it was uncomfortable and shift back to a more "normal" sleeping position only to have the bile came back up. Another hour of coughing and mild crying because I am so tired.

It took a few, miserable, weeks to figure out what works for me which is to take my antacid every day and then to not consume ANYTHING (aside from water) for at least two hours before I lay down to go to bed. Most of the time, this works.


YOUR TEETH FALL OUT

Actually you just become way more susceptible to cavities and other dental maladies. I got a HUGE cavity in one of my wisdom teeth early on in the pregnancy when no dentist will see you (yeah, during your first trimester, dentists don’t want to deal with you because they don’t want to be held liable during this pretty risky time in the pregnancy). It didn’t hurt, so I just was careful with it and went on with my life. Slowly it's began to just disintegrate in my mouth over the course of my pregnancy. Then I woke up one morning to discover what felt like large chunk had broken off in my sleep, leaving it sharp and cutting my cheek. The tooth itself still didn’t hurt, but I was having a lot of trouble eating because of it cutting my cheek – and obviously this tooth was just getting worse. I was just at the end of my second trimester (the trimester when you can actually go to the dentist, btw) so I needed to find one to see me fast (third trimesters are tricky too because you can go into labor from stress and most everyone is stressed out by the dentist). All they could do was grind down the sharp bits and say “come back after the baby is born and we’ll pull it.”


NESTING IS NOT WHAT THEY PORTRAY IT TO BE

Sure, mainstream media mentions nesting and how ladies get into this phase later in their pregnancies, but they don't really explain it. In the movies, it mainly involves getting the nursery ready and that's about as far as they takes it. Yeah, no.

Nesting is actually an uncontrollable urge to do all the things. I cannot sit still because I need be to doing laundry / dishes / sweeping / wiping / scrubbing / straightening / organizing / decluttering / mopping / etc. It's like a compulsion. Even when I've cleaned to the point of exhaustion, I can't sit still for more than ten minutes. I am not a "cleaning" type. My blog is called Lazy Lady for crying out loud. I feel like my mind has been taken over by a very tidy parasite.


THE HUNGER IS REAL

They talk about pregnant ladies being hungry, but it is usually in a comical, "look at my weird cravings" sort of way. Now that I've entered the third trimester, the hunger is anything but funny. Up until now, I've been able to pretty much eat as much food as I was regularly eating and be fine. An extra snack sometimes, but not much more. Now I eat a snack and my stomach feels like I just ate nothing. I have physical hunger pains as I eat apple after banana after yogurt after salad etc., etc.; all the while drinking GIANT bottles of water. 

It also doesn't help that I, like most other humans, am not pleasant to be around when hungry. I very much get hangry and right now I'm hangry that I'm down to my last snack and the end of this stomach growling is no where in sight.