a three post kinda day

i don't think i've ever posted three in a day, but I had to give an update on the job that I got a phone call from. i thought i was applying for a law clerk position posted on monster however the job wasn't a direct post from monster it was through a staffing firm and that was who called me. So, I googled the staffing firm and found TONS of negative reviews about how the firm operates. I thought the email they sent me was odd, because they told me that I needed two forms of id and two supervisory references. Mind you, there were 3 references on my resume already. So when I googled them I discovered that the reason they make you bring in the additional references is not because they check the references but because they take the references' contact information and use it to try to sell their temp services. So, to make a long story short I'm not going. I'm not ready to return to work anyway- as bored as I am, AMelia is only a month old- i still have 2 months before James starts his paternity leave. So- i guess its back to the drawing board!

ok that was funny

i was getting ready to finish up my last post by whining about how difficult it was to find a job using only on-line websites and i got a phone call from someone i put an application in for...now i've shot myself in the foot because i hadn't planned on going back to work until the end of march and they sounded like they needed someone yesterday. advice?

standing at the crossroads...

should i stay or should i go?

Let the 2010 job hunt begin! At 4 wks postpartum, I have gone from zombified baby servant to used to former "used to lack of sleep because of law school finals" lazarused resurrected self. Ie- i'm bored. It still baffles me how I can literally work all day on the house and not seem to get anything done...of course my 30 amelia breaks probably don't help. My current obsession is finding a new job. James got his first check after adding Amelia to his insurance and after that he's going to make about $60/month more than I do...which in all honesty, he bitches and moans about paying for my health care, but I have great health care...i mean having amelia cost us $150. total. That being said, he's very good at making me feel like I'm such a drain. I don't know what his deal is we have no bills except cell phone and car insurance. I busted my butt while I was pregnant and paid off our car and our two credit cards so that this wouldn't happen, but I guess he's going to whine no matter what. Therefore I started applying for jobs en masse today and will continue until someone hires me. I still have the offer to go back to my old job at the end of march and I think they'll allow me to take GAL cases which would be an excellent way for me to start my own practice..

toothless, barefoot and in the kitchen

fortunately i'm not pregnant anymore so i cannot fully complete the ky stereotype. I had to go to the dentist this morning and they pulled one of my teeth to put in an implant. Apparently the little cavity that I had last time manifested itself into some kind of tooth warfare. Amelia is having a growth spurt- she's been eating a LOT and sleeping a LOT! fortunately the midnight screaming has stopped the past couple of nights but for some odd reason she has trouble going back to bed after her 4 am bottle. I can't believe my baby will be a month old this week!

long nights, short days

I am not the best at troubleshooting but i think i've decided that Amelia doesn't have colic, she has her days and nights mixed up. I've been bouncing back between the two options for a week, but after last night's rendezvous with the rocker, I think my current conclusion is correct. First she slept from 9-12 ate and then was up til 2:30. She then slept until 4:45 and was up til 6. Then up again at 8 and since i was tired of sleeping in the recliner i kicked James out of the bed and Amelia and I co-slept for the first time. #1)this isn't a habit I want to start and #2) I first tried to sleep with her in the guest bed and she didn't like it...i don't know what the difference is to a 3 week old but i think it's funny that there is a difference to her. When the nights get long or she gets really fussy I keep myself motivated by listing what I love about her and thinking about the work it took to get her here and it makes it a lot easier. On the sadder news, i broke my camera, so until i get a new one or bum my friends I can't put up any pictures. This is sad because I have footage of my favorite amelia moment- Amelia snores!!!! It's SO cute. Just little baby snores but still!!!

week 3...

Someone once told me that every week of babyhood gets a little easier and thus far they are right. Amelia turned 3 weeks old yesterday. I can't believe it- she's growing so fast and my maternity leave is slipping through my fingers. That being said, it is getting easier. My mom came into town this weekend to watch Amelia and James and I went out and went shopping and had dinner with friends. We bought her a bathtub and James gave her her first tub bath! She didn't scream like she does with her normal wipe down, she seemed to really like it. To top it off both Sunday and Monday mornings when she got up at 8 i was able to give the baby to my mom and go back to bed for a couple of hours. It was blissful. On the downside, my free weight loss is over- i'm going to have to start working for it now.

you won't like me when I'm angry

Yesterday I went to Sears to pick up Amelia's newborn pictures and they had a sale for 5 sheets for $15 so of course I ordered more and the clerk said they would be back on the 28th. I said that was great because my daughter's one month birthday would be the 28th and I could get her one month pictures done...and then the clerk looked at me and said- "oh- you're going to be one of THOSE moms"..."well, just to let you know having your baby's picture taken every month is a waste of money because all the poses are the same". Thus prompting a follow up email to sears where I very briefly stated that if after 2 years of ttc I wanted to be one of "those moms" i would be and that if sears as a corporation couldn't realize how big of a cash cow "those moms" are for their business during this economy then maybe my business and that of my friends should look to JCPenny's or private photographers for all of our professional portrait needs. lmao. what a whore.

Week 2

Things are looking better here on Walton's Mountain. My milk supply is keeping up despite the warnings from friends on the board that it wasn't as good as nursing and I am having some luck getting Amelia to latch when she's stressed. I'm not complaining. I've started actively hunting for jobs after last week's impromptu phone interview that I botched (they woke me up after being up half the night). Other then that things are getting easier. Amelia is still sleeping about 20 hours a day which frees up a lot of time. James is petering out on me with the staying up with the baby bit after she turned his last endeavor to "take care of her while I slept" into a blindfolded trip down the Ho Chi Minh but aside from that, it's not bad...actually it's almost a little boring. I don't have a lot of physical recovery to do so i've been doing a lot of housework. And I've lost 27 lbs in 2 weeks. thank you amelia. I feel a little out of touch with my irl friends but i figured that would happen as i'm not overly close them. In the last week, I've successfully applied for 5 jobs and wonder why cover letters are necessary. I mean, it's obvious I want the job. I know no one reads cover letters. So, why are they so hard to write? I've also watched all of season 3 of big love and half of the john adams' hbo miniseries. I'm going through what I refer to as "new mom guilt"....literally all i want to do is hold and rock my baby but my mom's voice in my head tells me to put her down and let her be. So i feel guilty for holding her and put her in her bouncy seat or on her play mat and then i feel bad for laying her down. lmao. i'm sure I'll adjust. I guess maternity leave is really just a way to wean yourself away from being pregnant and having 24-7 baby access

turning myself in...

I think my confession would make some of the girls on my board gasp- Amelia is never going to learn to breastfeed. I talked to 5, count them 5, lactation consultants in the hospital who all told me different things- one who told me to feed my baby through a SYRINGE!!!! We even went to the lc yesterday and you know when my little booger is there with an lc she can latch on and eat like a champ. We came home yesterday and the lc had told me not to give her another bottle (before my milk came in i was offering the breast and then pumping and giving what was left and a couple of times had to add a little formula-shhhh) and that she would cry for a couple of days and then get over it and go back to the breast... I was all gung ho for this until we got home and she actually not just cried but screamed for about 7 hours (only stopping to sleep and latch for 5 minutes every now and then). By the time James' got home i was frazzled. We talked about it and though we both really want this to work we realize that not every baby is meant to be a champion breastfeeder and that as long as she's getting the breast milk we will be happy but that neither of us want our child to go hungry just to force her to do something. I mean I go back to work in 10 weeks anyway and she'll have to be almost strictly bottle then anyway, so trying to force her back onto the breast when i'm only going to take her off of it seems impractical. I guess I'm just trying to convince myself that I'm not a horrible mother because this isn't working for us. I will continue to offer the nursing first but can't put myself or the baby through the torture of forcing her back on. Allowing my child to go hungry goes against every instinct I have even the one that tells me that I should be nursing. So there, don't tell on me because you all know some of the girls on our board would go off, but that is my big secret.

Amelia's first week

I'm not going to say it has been easy...actually there have been a couple of times when I have messaged friends that have more than one child and asked them how they even functioned. That being said, James and I are both completely in love with Amelia. We were dismissed from the hospital Wednesday night at 5:30. We had to take her back to the dr Wednesday-Saturday for a bili check and a weigh in. She was born at 7.3, dismissed at 7lbs and got down to 6.9- primarily because my milk would just NOT come in. We had to give her some formula and then after some botched advice from the lactation consultant fed her with a syringe for the first night. My milk finally came in friday which is when the dr told us to nurse, then pump and offer the bottle. BIG mistake. Now I can't get Amelia to latch. I'm working on it though. As of now most of are feedings are pumped breast milk. James is such a terrific father. He feeds her and loves on her and has spent most of the week singing "there's my daughter in the water". I'm pretty sure he got my ppd though because I've seen him cry several times over the past week. I personally am feeling great (asides from a little sleep deprivation and random tingling) and am learning all the things that people should tell you about newborns that they didn't tell us. such as

1) unless your baby is a premie, you don't have to feed them with a medicine dropper
2) they will go back to breastmilk if you give them formula a couple of times. You don't have to beat yourself up over it.
3) always pump before you shower or your milk will let down and you'll have to bath again
4) when your milk comes in, it goes every where
5) you will spend the first week of your baby's life evaluating stool
6) if you have a little girl, her estrogen levels drop after she separates from you and will have discharge and spotting (btw-freaked us out).

I'm sure there will be more to add to the list as I progress.

The birth story...

Man. I am BEHIND! I have never been this happy to be this exhausted. lmao. Amelia's birth went fairly well. We went in Sunday night Dec 27th and the drs decided that cytotech (my old friend) would be the best way to ripen my cervix for delivery. They did 3 25mg doses (midnight, 3 and 6) and by 6 am i was only 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced and Amelia's heart rate started to drop drastically because the contractions were coming too quick to give her a break to recover. So they gave me a shot of something to stop my contractions and then decided that the best way to get me to dilate was to use a foley balloon (think cervical angioplasty). At this point I had had like 6 people check me, which I'm sorry, but being checked is the worst part of labor (aside from the pushing) and I decided that if they were going to inflate a balloon in my area that I needed some drugs. Being assured that an epidural would not slow down pitocin induced labor, we went for it. They put the balloon in and i probably laid there until 11 just waiting for Amelia's heart rate to recover enough for them to feel comfortable starting the pitocin...which they did about 11 am. The dr came back before her 2 o'clock c section and removed the balloon and I was dilated 3.5!!! She decided to speed things along and broke my water only to discover TONS of meconium (which apparently is very common for 40 week babies). They said she probably did it that morning when her heart rate dropped. After she broke my water there was just a lot of waiting. In retrospect it went very quickly. James was a champ- he snuck me little sips of water in my ice chips because i was literally DYING of thirst. My 5 o'clock nurse said good bye and turned OFF my pitocin because the dr had a 6 oclock c-section and i was too close to pushing. The night nurse, who I still love, came back in at 6:30 and said that she thought I was ready, turned the pitocin back on and jacked it up. by 8 o'clock i was ready to push. The nurse told me she thought the baby would be out in about 45-1hr...boy did she LIE!!!! I told James I thought it would be 2-3 hours and she laughed at me. She laughed until she realized that the baby was still at -2. I had tons of energy the first hour and a half of delivery. I pushed like a pro but then I hit the wall. I got to the point where my cervix was swelling and the nurse spent half her time with her fingers in my cooch telling me to push them out and then sweeping the sides to make room for the baby. Plus they had a blood pressure cuff on my left arm that activated every 15 minutes and for some reason between the cuff and the fingers I lost it. I just started crying- not wailing but just tears. I never thought I was going to get this baby out. Finally the dr came in and we start really pushing hard. they brought the mirror in for me to see her head of hair coming out and in all honesty the only thing it did was discourage me so I asked them to take it away. lol. James, on the other hand, manned up enough to sneak a peak and found his motivation. He said "Honey we have HAIR....PUSH it out". lmao. The nurses told him afterward that he needed to quit his day job and become a doula because he was such an excellent coach. Finally I could feel her right at the bottom and I was exhausted. We started one last set of 3 contractions and the dr said that if i had one more I should go for it and i did and she came FLYING out- head, shoulders, everything in one giant whoosh. And then I freaked out...she wasn't crying. The dr said they didn;t want her to cry because of the meconium so they whisked her over to the peds closet and started working on her. The poor baby came into this world jaundice with a conehead worthy of SNL and covered in her own crap. I was fine as soon as the baby was out, but then it was James' turn to cry. We could see into the peds room where they were working on her and he just lost it. They took her to the main nursery and James followed my previous command of "no matter what happens to me if that baby leaves our sight, follow that kid" and he was gone. I finished delivery and they stitched me up- only a second degree tear- thanks a lot baby! And it was over. 25 hours and 32 minutes after we walked into the hospital. Best day of my life. The only thing I wanted after delivery was a real honest to GOD coke and James came in from the nursery with a coke. Best damn coke ever!