Cleaning Trick #140525

Silly wabbit, I don't have any REAL cleaning tricks. Well, actually just one. If you spill red wine on a white carpet, quickly spill white wine on the spill and it will prevent a stain. Should you be drinking solo or are all out of white wine, get your party guests to lift your couches as you turn your area rug counterclockwise until the impending stain will be safely hidden under a sofa or table. Note: this trick is limited in how many times you can use it.
Anyway, cleaning tonight was a challenge. My wonderful mother came by today to watch my daughter as I cleaned my upstairs and my husband cleaned our basement. So naturally for the first two hours my mother was here I went grocery shopping.
So, after putting away groceries and cooking dinner in a hurry, I started to clean the kitchen. Well, kinda. I played musical countertops. You know, the game where you take everything off most of the counters and dump it on one counter, so the clutter is pile high versus spread out. Somehow, the effect is a seemingly neater house. Same amount of junk cluttered differently appears to shrink.
Now, musical countertops has long been a staple of my cleaning routine. I usually, as I did today, pile everything on the kitchen table where I can comfortably sit with my morning coffee and go through the junk mail that seems to multiply in the mail box like some sort of petri dish. And if you are being completely honest, I am sure you've played some version of musical countertops at least a couple times. Sometimes, it is all the cleaning I have energy for. I did after all vacuum this morning, grocery shop, put away the groceries, cook dinner, feed the baby several times, play with the baby and figured out how to download the program required to transfer the pictures from my cell phone to my MAC. I haven't figured out how to transfer pictures, so that is top of my to do list tomorrow. After changing diapers and nursing a hungry baby. If I am lucky, the game of musical countertops will end tomorrow night with me actually going through that pesky junk mail.

Weird Dream #140523

I have weird dreams. Like really weird dreams. Sometimes they are scary, sometimes they are funny, but almost always they are just plain strange. Like cartoon musicals strange.
Last night's dream is no exception. I had a rough night due to broken sleep all night and a too full belly from a chinese food buffet, but that's a different story. All of which most likely contributed to my crazy dream. So here goes, last night's dream......
The husband and I were at a planetarium type museum at which we were examining a 3-D diagram of the Milky Way listening to a podcast or other audio recording of Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining that we are on a collision course with our closest neighboring galaxy some millions of light years away, nearly verbatim his lecture in his "The Inexplicable Universe" series. So there we are, the husband and I, musing about just how massive these two galaxies are and how what we are seeing is actually what happened millions of years ago because that is how long it took for that light to reach us. In my dream my husband repeats his typical end of the discussion and continues that the stars we are seeing now can very easily not actually exist anymore because they are so far away that it takes millions of years for their light to reach us, so that star and that star could actually have already gone super nova and we will never know. Then Neil deGrasse Tyson comes on a tv screen that appears out of nowhere and has a conversation with my husband as if by Skype, petting the hub's ego by praising his extraordinary intelligence. Then, and this is where it gets really weird, then Neil (can I call you Neil?) Says to my husband "but can you cook?" Then Neil's image on the tv morphs into a cartoon that actually looks like the cat from Paula Abdul's half cartoon half live action video for the song "Opposites Attract". And Neil, in all his cartoon cat-self glory, begins to give my husband cooking instructions and recipe for what Neil swore was the best Thanksgiving Day Feast imaginable, which consisted mainly of pork chops - bone-in cooked with only a single frying pan.
At that point, the baby woke up looking for a mid-night snack, and thus concluded Neil's cooking lesson.
Like I said. I have weird dreams.

Mommy physics #140519

Mommy physics.  An elusive subject that despite a millennium of brilliant research cannot be fully understood or explained.  Einstein's theory of relativity should theoretically apply and work, but its as successful as applying a bandaid to a broken arm.
Our first lesson:
In every home in which resides a baby that doesn't like to sleep,  there is a pinpoint coordinates in the space-time continuum that presides outside the bedroom door of restlessly sleeping babe, at any point in time within the confines of 9pm and 9am. It is never present in the converse of 9am to 9pm. Further, its location is fluid, the pinpoint moves with ease, like an air bubble in a sippy cup, unfortunately,  it does not shift with the same predictability.  Also, the said coordinates work much like a wormhole, transporting the baby from a state of peaceful sleep to riotous commotion faster than the speed of light.  An unseen energy that swallows silence as effectively as a black hole swallows light.
If you are a sleep deprived parent you know the dreaded monster of which I speak (er, write).
The terrifying FLOOR CREAK. Its not there in the morning as the husband gets ready for work.  Its not there in the afternoon while im running around with CDD (cleaning deficit disorder). Its not there as we trapse in and out of my daughter's bedroom all day for diaper and wardrobe changes.  No, it is only there in the wee hours of the morning, lurking like a monster beneath our bed. Waiting. Waiting ever so patiently to spring forth at the exact moment to elicit the maximum amount of terror and dred. And by some cruel irony of the universe, the creak increases in volume and duration exponentially in direct relation to one's efforts to move slowly and silently.  The more gingerly you place your foot and shift your weight the louder and more obnoxious that floor announces that your pea sized bladder needs to be relieved....again. However, and this is where neither string theory,  Newton's laws or relativity apply - the creak appears even if you move differently, attempting the fast, light footed flittering of a fairy instead of the purposeful stealth of a ninja. And its just as loud, and how in the world does it continue even after you've crossed into the other room. It follows a sleep deprived, full baddered parent like a phantasm, eager to cause mischief and disturb the precariously sleeping babe behind the partially closed door. How can a mom compete against the unruly, unfair tricks of the universe?  How does that floor creak on its own? Like the gravitational pull of the moon during that exact moment of the Earth's daily rotation was just too much to resist so the hard wood had to, Just HAD TO, sqeak with pleasure. 
It leads a desperate parent to wonder if her infant is too young for earplugs. 
Advanced calculus has yet to solve this particular mystery of the universe. Any person who can solve this particular equation deserves the Nobel Prize.

Things that suck about being a mom #140511 and a Happy Mother's Day to you too!

Sooo.... she slept 3 hours. I've been restless, dozing in and out. Brutus, once he's down for the night is as stationary as the couch he lays on, always has been. UNLESS, he has to go outside. Then and only then does he get up in the middle of the night. AZ used to graze on her leftovers and water, Brutus won't budge not til morning and you better be prepared to forklift him if necessary. So, now as he is ailing and has a hard time sensing his bladder and bowel, if he's moving at 2 am chances are he's already going. And he was noisy as he dragged himself by her door, which was wide open. It's only three hours later, I know she's not hungry. So now we are crying it out again, second time in one night. I know in the long run this is important, but damn, everything in me hurts about this. My heart, my head, my ears. I ache for her, crying because Brutus woke her, he's not at fault, he's a good boy. I want to go in, hold her and comfort her. I went in after I finished cleaning the little bit of mess - I caught it in time and sent daddy outside with him- so I don't know how long that was. Rubbed her back, said I loved her and that it's time to go to sleep. She's been winding down as I type, but every time I think she's calmed and is comforting herself back to sleep and is quiet she starts up again. But I know if I go in there it will only rejuvenate her efforts. This. SUCKS dirty jock straps dipped in fertilizer mud.....

'Crying-it-out' because the pediatrician recommends it for long term sleeping success, probably because at the baby's last well visit I looked like the tangled, worn and wet cloth diapers I've pulled dripping from the washing machine just the night before. 'Crying it out' sucks - BIG TIME! I'm told it is worth it in the long run because then the baby in question sleeps. And I guess 45 minutes of middle of the night crying is not AS bad as it could be. And while I know that my daughter needs to learn limits and this is only one form of her protesting her wants and me being firm and resolute is setting the stage for the future of our relationship - when she wants that toy/lollipop/sleepover/car in the future, she'll know from her own experiences that if and when I say 'no' I mean 'no', there is a small part of me, the baby within me, who wants desperately to cling to her, hold her, comfort her, tell her it will be ok and fall asleep with her cuddled in my arms. This also sucks. Doing something NEITHER of us want and not doing something that we BOTH want because it is what is good for BOTH of us - that part of being a mom sucks.