Speech Act

moving on

2011-10-25T11:42:00.001+02:00

I've moved to Wordpress. Please come visit!
http://okomama.wordpress.com/

conversation last night

2011-08-08T11:24:00.002+02:00

Marie stumbles sleepily into our bedroom, where the light is still on.

Marie: The light is so bright!

Me: We'll turn it off in a minute. Papa just has to finish reading something.

A few moments later, Papa leans over to reach the light switch.

Marie: No!

Papa: But I thought you wanted me to turn out the light?

Marie: I'm thirsty.

Papa: OK, then drink some water, and then I'll turn out the light.

Marie: I can drink in the dark.

Papa: Er, OK.

Papa turns off the light.

Marie: I can't see!!!!!!

Papa and I try to stifle our hysterical laughter.

the praised carrots

2011-02-04T23:12:00.003+01:00

I'm not really writing these days, but I thought I'd share a recipe for the yummiest carrot salad I've ever eaten. Seriously, this is NOTHING like the carrot salads you've had before.

For 4 people (or 2 greedy carrot lovers) you'll need:

1 - 1 1/2 pounds carrots (big, fat carrots are better than small and slender ones here)
1 lime
sugar
salt
pepper
brown mustard seeds
cumin (whole)
asafoetida (an Indian spice)
sunflower oil (or other neutral-flavored vegetable oil)
roasted peanuts (salted or unsalted)
fresh cilantro (aka coriander)

Start off by heating about a tablespoon of the oil in a small skillet. Toss in 1/2 tsp brown mustard seeds, 1/2 tsp cumin and a pinch of asafoetida. Heat and stir until the spices begin to crackle. Remove from heat.

While the oil and spices are cooling off, peel your carrots and chop them into very thin slices or use a vegetable grater, mandolin or food processor to achieve a similar result (if you use a cheese grater, the pieces will be too small, but the largest setting on a box grater should be ok). Transfer the carrots to a medium-sized salad bowl.

Squeeze the juice from the lime. You should be able to get about 2 tablespoons. In a small bowl, mix the lime juice with a generous pinch of sugar and a small pinch of salt. Add the cooled-off oil and spices from the skillet and swish it all around. Add this to the carrots and mix to evenly coat the carrots with the liquid. It might seem like there's not enough liquid for the large amount of carrots, but don't worry. Just mix well and it'll be enough.

Now go do something else for half an hour. Work on whatever other dish you're making or take a bath, call your best friend or go walk the dog. Just let the salad sit there. After 30 minutes have passed, get yourself a scant 1/4 cup of peanuts and chop them roughly. While you're at it, take a whack at your fresh cilantro. This is your garnish, but I'm a cilantro fiend so I use several large handfuls rather than the specified smaller amount. Throw the peanuts and cilantro in the salad and salt and pepper to taste (Remember that if your peanuts are already salted, you don't want to add too much to the salad!). Toss the whole thing well and be prepared to fight your family for a coveted second helping!

My source suggests serving this with grilled fish, which I'm sure would be amazing, but I say this salad stands alone and would be perfect with some flat bread and raita!

my big little girl

2010-06-14T18:13:00.004+02:00

As Marie sleeps on the couch, miserable with what seems to be scarlet fever, I thought I'd share pictures of our ice-cream-loving, Lego-building, singing and dancing 3-year-old. Her favorite ice cream flavor is mango, and when she orders it, she asks for "mango and white." White is, of course, vanilla. So far, three is a wonderful age, and when she zips around on her new Like-A-Bike, I wonder how long it will be before she's all grown up and riding around in the big wide world. I'm sure it'll happen way too soon.

the voices in my head

2010-05-10T18:10:00.002+02:00

I don't know if it's because she's about to turn three or because she just woke up one morning three weeks ago and decided to potty train herself or because she's just Marie, but it seems like the only voice she has is whining. Whining at me. All day long. Just now she walked into the kitchen and asked for a piece of bread and butter. Except she didn't ask. She whined, "Mamaaaaaaaaaaah, breaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!" as if I was draining the life force out of her as she said the words. If she had asked for bread and I had denied her, I could sort of understand her repeating the request in a whining tone. I mean, it would still drive me nuts, but I could begin to understand. But Marie shows up whining. That's how she enters the world these days. She wakes up whining. Comes home whining. Asks for things whining. Refuses things whining. And while she whines about 50% of the time with her father, it feels like she whines 100% of the time with me. Okay, maybe 99%.

She has now perfected the pitch of the whines to such an extent that I no longer roll my eyes or sigh or take a deep breath when she lets one rip. I cringe. I get twitchy. And I yell. Far more than is called for. Because three-year-olds whine, right? I mean, this is what the parenting books say. What other parents say. What grandparents and daycare providers and teachers say. It is the way of the world. This is what I signed up for. But in the battle of Not Letting Things Get to Me, I have lost, and so I yell. Marie's voice is whining and mine is yelling.

We need to get some new voices up in here.

what was that?

2010-02-11T22:13:00.000+01:00

Did I hear you say something about treats?

taken on a thursday morning

2010-02-08T23:21:00.002+01:00

fiddling with photoshop

2010-02-04T00:49:00.002+01:00

I can count the number of times I've used Photoshop on one hand. Well, now I'm determined to teach myself how to use it to make my photos more print-worthy. This is the result of tonight's experimentation. Nothing too great, but I'm beginning to get an idea of what I can do with some of my favorite snapshots.

basement woes

2010-01-18T23:15:00.003+01:00

We're a little tired over here. A pipe burst in our basement, and we (well, Toffi, actually) had to go down and sort through everything and figure out what had gotten wet and what hadn't. And, have you seen our basement? No? Well rest assured, it's full of crap. A LOT of crap. So after the crap had been sorted into wet and dry, the wet stuff was dried and put into dry boxes. Unfortunately, a lot of the wet stuff was clothing and other textiles, so I've been doing a lot of laundry. And since we don't own a dryer and have only 2 racks for line-drying, I've had to take some of the laundry to the laundromat to dry faster. Because the washing machine runs at least once a day anyway. Before you account for the crap. When I'm done with the laundry (probably the day after tomorrow), I think I'm going to buy some plastic, waterproof storage boxes.

it was a very merry Christmas

2009-12-28T11:38:00.000+01:00

In the beginning was the word...

2009-12-15T20:47:00.001+01:00

...and the word was "Scheiße."

Yep. That's the latest addition to Marie's vocabulary. Oops. We'd better start watching our language around here!

Introducing...

2009-11-20T21:13:00.002+01:00

...Greta Louise Born. Ta da! Wasn't that a neat trick? We grew a baby inside me, and after exactly 37 weeks of pregnancy, she's outside! Seriously, one day earlier, and she would have technically been a preemie. She was born November 19, 2009 at 5:37 pm. 50 cm long, 3550 grams. You can convert that into U.S. units; I'm too lazy to do it now. Oh, and Greta would like it to be known that she is just as relieved as the rest of us that all that avoiding-a-premature-birth stress is over. She was totally ready to come out, thankyouverymuch.

when grown men cry

2009-11-12T14:20:00.003+01:00

Robert Enke, the German national soccer team's goalkeeper, committed suicide two days ago, and ever since, the television has been on a lot in our house. Of course Toffi is following the news not only for personal interest reasons, but also because he works in sports journalism. I have to say, though, that it's been an overwhelming story for us. All of the macho men from German soccer have been breaking into tears at press conferences and in interviews. Enke's fellow players aren't giving interviews yet, understandably. His wife participated in a press conference less than 24 hours after his death, something I couldn't imagine doing. I suspect she wanted people to realize that soccer players are people, too, but that the professional soccer establishment puts a lot of pressure on its stars to fit into certain norms. And severe depression, with the self-doubt, fear, anger and sadness that accompany it, just doesn't fit into those norms. Enke was afraid of checking himself into a clinic because he thought child services might take his adopted daughter away from him if it became public that he suffered from depression. He had huge fears of failure. Soccer wasn't merely his vocation - it was the only thing that could really distract him from all the darkness that surrounded him. He deceived his therapist and family in recent weeks because he didn't want anyone intervening with his plans to commit suicide. It pains me to hear and read about his story; the empathy I feel for Enke scares me a little and makes it a little tricky to push away my own dark clouds. But I see a glimmer of hope, because when I see those soccer bigwigs cry, when I hear their words on the subject, I think to myself, "They really get it." Something got through to them, and I hope that their discussion of Enke and of depression in general will help get the message out that depression is real, that it destroys lives, and that society has a lot of catching up to do in terms of accepting people with mental illness.

Announcing the Marie & Baby Bicycle Fund!

2009-11-02T21:29:00.007+01:00

Okay all you well-wishers with itchy trigger fingers, welcome to my Virtual Baby Shower 2.0!

I recently explained that we would prefer not to receive any baby gifts, either before or after our little one arrives. Some of you have expressed your dismay, others your burning curiosity, and I know that a few of you are quietly mourning the loss of a chance to buy adorable pink onesies and receiving blankets while daydreaming about baby toes and that sweet smell of a newborn's head. And they're probably some who are relieved that we aren't expecting them to go on a shopping spree on our behalf (I don't blame them!). Believe me, I've had my own struggles to keep my money in my pockets and not splurge on cute baby stuff. But we really do have everything we need. After everyone was so generous last time around and given the fact that we're having another girl, we're in no shortage of baby supplies (although if you know of a place where I can get my hands on a few extra hours of sleep a night, let me know!).

So, what do we want?

Your money!

More specifically, we want a bicycle, a beautiful, practical, environmentally friendly bicycle that we could never, ever afford on our own. And to make this possible, we'd like a little of your hard-earned cash. Here, let me show you the awesomeness of the bicycle:

Is that cool or what? These Dutch and Danish cargo bikes seat up to four children (with seat belts and everything!), and have the means to safely transport an infant by securing an infant car seat. The children are better protected against accident and injury in these bikes than they are in a child's bicycle seat or bicycle trailer. And when you're not carting quite so many kids around, there's tons of room for groceries, dogs, adults or whatever you need to take with you. They come with rain covers and sun covers to keep your precious cargo protected in all kinds of weather. Each bicycle is customized to the needs of the buyer. They are a city family's dream come true!

See? Even grandma can get a lift!

But seriously, folks, we have been eyeing these bikes for almost 2 years now, and as a no-car family, bicycles are already our main mode of transportation. But soon with two children, it's going to be tough to keep up our mobility, let alone to transport groceries. We could try to find a good used car, but we prefer this healthy, environmentally friendly option. In a big city like Berlin, cars are more of a hassle than a help. Most of our destinations are within biking distance, though not within walking-with-babies-and-toddlers distance.

But the awesomeness comes at a price - a hefty price of about 1,500 Euros - and we just don't have that kind of money, nor are we in a position to really save anything toward such a goal. And thus, we ask you, dear friends, to help us out. Instead of going baby shopping, take the money you would have spent on onesies, booties and blankies (plus the postage it would have cost you to send it to us), and make a small donation to our Marie & Baby Bicycle Fund.

To make the process as convenient as possible for you, we've set up a PayPal button right here on this website, meaning you can use any major credit card to make the donation. This eliminates the hassle of international money transfers, currency conversion and all that mess. When you click on the "Donate" button, you'll be taken through a simple, step-by-step process. You can enter the amount in Dollars, and we receive the equivalent in Euros. When you think about it, this is a very green gift-giving option! Maybe even carbon-neutral! No packaging, no shipping stuff halfway around the world. Just a simple contribution.

If you live in Germany and/or have a German bank account, you're more than welcome to transfer the money directly. If that's the case, just email me: apfelmus [at] gmail [dot] com, and I'll send you all the details.

If any of our mutual friends are considering sending us baby gifts, please tell them about this little fund we're setting up for our daughters.

And lastly, please know that this fund is meant for those of you who can afford to make a contribution - large or small. If times are tough, we
t o t a l l y understand. Maybe you can make a contribution sometime down the road (I don't expect to raise the money overnight), but we'd be just as happy to receive a thoughtful card or email when we welcome our new family member to this world!

no gifts, please!

2009-10-09T00:25:00.002+02:00

Some of you have started asking us what sort of gifts we'd like to receive when the baby arrives (and/or beforehand). It's very sweet of y'all to think of us, so to simplify things, I'm going to preempt any further questions by saying this:

Please don't buy us anything!!!

And yes, I'm being totally serious. As irresistible as baby shopping can be (believe me, I have to restrain myself), we have just about everything we need. We're having another girl, and we have soooooo many cute baby girl clothes in all sizes that to buy or receive more would just be ridiculous. The same goes for stuffed animals, baby blankets, teething toys, bibs and just about every other imaginable category of baby goodies.

But please, don't fret. There IS something you can do for us. I won't tell you what it is yet, but rest assured, after being so brazen as to host my own virtual baby shower last time, I'll be doing it again for our new baby. And when I do, you'll have the opportunity to give us something we really, really want as a family of four to be!

Marie's Bakery

2009-10-03T21:40:00.002+02:00

You might think it’s unbelievable that I never baked with Marie until she was over 2 years old. Or maybe that’s normal – I’m not sure. In any case, her father has made pancakes and crepes with her before, but although she likes to stand on a stepladder and watch me make her oatmeal in the mornings, all past attempts to cook or bake with her were more or less disastrous.

But three weeks ago, I had a hankering for chocolate chip cookies, and I thought it might be a good time to try letting Marie help. It was wonderful! What a difference a few months makes!

I measured the ingredients, and Marie dumped them into the appropriate bowls. We took turns mixing, with Marie doing most of it at the beginning, and me taking over at the end, when the dough became to thick for her. And then I showed her that when you’re done, you can lick the bowl. You should have seen the look on her face – it was as if she had suddenly seen the light.

Anyway, since then, we’ve baked on one day each weekend, and I must say that I look forward to it as much as Marie does.

The real action was too much fun to stop and take pictures, but here’s Marie, hangin’ out with the cooling rack, hardly able to wait for the first batch to come out of the oven:

And here she is at another crucial moment – “cleaning” the bowl:

And here she is after today’s baking fun, modeling one of my aprons:

Amazing, but true: baking with 2-year-olds is fun!

confessions of an overwhelmed mom

2009-09-16T16:35:00.004+02:00

Parenthood really tests your limits. So far, our family consists of a mom, a dad, a two-year-old, a neurotic 11-year-old dog and a very active fetus. I know single moms taking care of two children, happily married moms taking care of four children, and others with two to three children who are happily married but whose husbands are seemingly constantly away on business.

I don't know how they do it.

Do you?

I have to remind myself from time to time that no one "does it all." Even if it seems like they do, it's probably just what it looks like to someone on the outside. And even when you scratch beneath the surface and it still looks like they're "doing it all," they're not.

Anyone "doing it all" is neglecting something, usually themselves.

I have to remind myself of this because it helps keep me from despairing when I feel like I'm failing as a mom, wife, translator or member of society. In fact, I have to remind myself in general of the deceptiveness of the feeling of "the grass is always greener on the other side." For example, some of my favorite blogs include Soule Mama, Betz White and Angry Chicken. And when I read their thoughts and see their pictures, it's easy to think my life would be easier and more harmonious if I didn't live in a big metropolis. So many of the things I value in family life seem so much easier to include in said life when you live somewhere a little quieter. And then I have to remind myself that a) I'm not seeing the whole picture of any of these women's lives, and b) there are things about living in a big city that I would miss horribly. I see my Ozzie friend Amanda raising her two young children while her husband jets around the globe on business, and I see her do it with such seeming effortlessness, that I wonder if I'm just plain incompetent.

But if I really stop and think about it, I'm not incompetent, and while city living does make certain family rituals much harder to establish and uphold, it's not the reason I feel like a failure sometimes.

I am, quite simply, overwhelmed right now.

Why, you ask?

I have a two-year-old;
I am six months pregnant;
This pregnancy, while not high-risk, has been very hard;
I have been laid up with a sinus infection for the last seven days;
My social network in Berlin has shrunk to miniscule proportions;
We're going through a major financial rough spot (oddly enough, totally unrelated to the global financial crisis, but I'll address this whole can of worms in another post);
And lastly, alas, after 28+ years of life in this body, I still tend to bite off more than I can chew.

I have a very spirited daughter who is incredibly intelligent but also seems to epitomize the "terrible twos." She's growing up bilingual, and that seems to have slowed her speech development a little. Her comprehension is excellent. She also has a fairly large vocabulary, but if you don't speak both German and English, it's pretty hard to understand what she says, and even if you do, it's still not easy. This communication barrier does not exactly serve to diffuse the many little conflicts we have on a day-to-day basis. We're also going through a rather difficult potty learning phase. She HATES wearing a diaper or having her diaper changed. She shows all the physical signs of readiness for potty learning, including telling us she has to go right before she does go, and she seems willing enough to use the potty at daycare. But at home, she has no interest in sitting on her potty for longer than about 2 seconds. And inevitably, the pee ends up streaming down her legs (if she's not wearing a diaper), and she gets very, very upset. Now, please don't tell me it won't be long before she connects the dots and becomes willing to use the potty - we've been at this plane for about 6 months now. Oh, and when I change her diaper, she kicks me - and I mean hard - in my 6-months-pregnant belly.

Which brings us to the next part. I'm pregnant. And this has not been an easy pregnancy, nor is it likely to get any easier. It started out as a twin pregnancy; I lost one of the twins due to a hormonal imbalance. When this condition was identified, I began taking supplementary hormones, which was no fun. Months of exhaustion and nausea later, recent lab tests revealed that I'm anemic (no surprise there - I was last time, too) and that I have ketonuria, which basically means that my body is malnourished and therefore dipping into its own reserves to keep me going. Okay, so I suppose that explains why I still feel so incredibly run down and weak, and it may help explain why I'm still experiencing morning sickness at 28 weeks. It also proves that it's not "all in my head," like I've sometimes wondered in moments where mind-over-matter thinking has got the better of me. It also doesn't help that my blood pressure is regularly around 100/55 and sometimes even lower. Put all these factors together, and there's simply no way I could feel physically fit.

Fortunately, I have an awesome midwife, and together, we've come up with a plan for strengthening my body and mind from inside and out. A lot of it has to do with nutrition, a lot of it has to do with yoga and massage, and a lot of it has to do with me filtering out some of the junk in my head so that I can focus on what I need and want right now, both for myself and my family. I had a good start on this, a couple days of truly nourishing food, a less hectic schedule that still allowed me to feel a sense of accomplishment, but then I went and overdid it.

One morning last week, I was picking up a package at the post office when I had a sudden fainting episode. A postal worker called my husband, who picked me up right away and told me to take it easy for the rest of the day. But I wouldn't listen. I rested for the first couple hours, but then I insisted on shopping for some essentials we needed for some home improvement projects. Toffi insisted on coming with me, since he didn't want his wife collapsing again, and so off we went. On our way back home, I could feel my right sinus cavity closing up, a very strange and very unpleasant sensation. Once we were home, we picked up Marie from daycare and had tea and cakes with Toffi's sister and her boyfriend. By the end of all this, I was completely spent, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in Sinus Infection Hell.

That was seven days ago. I seem to have gotten over the worst of the sinus infection and to have avoided the dreaded prolonged bacterial infection, but I'm still not feeling well. I have spent seven days in bed, and I'm still too weak to do any normal activities, but at least I can get up and do a few simple things around the apartment. After the first three days were over and I was no longer sleeping 18 hours a day, one of the hardest things was to just lie there and not go crazy thinking about all things I needed and wanted to get done. I hate feeling so powerless.

But I'm trying to focus on the plan my midwife and I put together:

more rest
whole foods nutrition
no caffeine (or at least no more than a cup of green tea per day)
yoga, one class a week and at least one hour a week at home
massage, both professional and from my husband
being more present when I'm spending time with Marie, giving her more loving attention so she doesn't have as many reasons to "act out"
working on my social network

The last point is crucial, I think. I made a lot of friends in the first couple years I lived in Berlin, but I've devoted less and less energy to meeting new people in the past few years. While I've kept up my friendships with a lot of people from my early days, quite a few of them don't live in Berlin anymore. So I have a lot of long-distance friendships and not very many friends whom I can see in the flesh very often. This also means I don't have the best support network when it comes to finding someone to help me out with something at the last minute. Although it's not the same thing, being out there in the blogosphere had been very helpful, but I haven't really been around in that sense lately. So I'm really going to try to work on my virtual and real friendships, and hopefully make some new friends. Maybe the next time I go to the playground with Marie... whenever I get over this damn cold.

gone fishing

2009-07-06T04:22:00.001+02:00

We’re on vacation, and although I had every intention of posting regularly, it turns out it’s just too hot in my parents’ computer room to get anything more done than checking email. Ah well, that’s what vacations are for, right?

titanium man

2009-06-11T21:13:00.000+02:00

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another part falls spectacularly to pieces."

This quotation from Bridget Jones's Diary (an homage to the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice) has been rattling around my brain the last few days. My pregnancy symptoms have lessened in severity, I have been able to sleep at least half the time and Marie's sleep has also begun to improve a little. And then, on Monday, I got a phone call from Toffi.

He was supposed to be playing soccer. If the game had been canceled, he would have called earlier. But it was too early for the game to be over already. I instantly knew something was up.

"Yeah, hi. I think I just broke my arm. I'm on my way to the hospital. Can you text me my health insurance info?"

Three hours and change later, Toffi came home with a cast on his arm. But I hadn't even heard the real news yet. The fracture is very complicated, and it won't heal properly unless he has surgery and a titanium pin implanted. And for reasons that I still haven't completely managed to understand, he needs to stay in the hospital for 4-5 days after the surgery so that he can be under close observation in case his body rejects the foreign object. Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning. So for the next five days, Marie and I will be making daily trips to the hospital to visit her papa. I hope it doesn't freak her out too much.

two years

2009-06-08T20:55:00.002+02:00

Remember this bundle of joy?
Can you believe this is the same little girl?
I can hardly believe it myself, but we've been blessed with her smiles and infectious laughter for 2 whole years now. Happy Birthday, Marie!

nuthin' to say...

2009-05-20T22:49:00.002+02:00

Just thought I'd let you know we're all still alive and well. I haven't felt inspired to write much lately, but be sure to check out the new photos I uploaded to Flickr.

polite calendar dance

2009-03-26T19:45:00.003+01:00

I just read this post at Simply Stated, RealSimple magazine's blog. This resonated with me so strongly! Toffi and I just had a reeeeeally long, serious ... ehm ... discussion about this very topic last night. I'm one of those people who says what she means and means what she says. Toffi is a bit more casual with language, and it sometimes leads to huge misunderstandings. Which category do you fall into?

cooking and baking cheat sheet

2009-03-19T21:29:00.003+01:00

This isn't really about anything; I just thought I'd share. We have a big shelf of all sorts of cookbooks in our kitchen, and although I have my standard references (The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Spoon), I use a variety of books for the dishes I prepare. Some of the books are American, others are German. While I can approximate a lot of measurement conversions in my head, it's really annoying to have to do lots of mental math while following a complicated recipe, and whipping out a calculator doesn't necessarily make things any easier. You see, in the U.S., we measure mostly in cups, by volume, while in Germany, ingredients are measured in grams, by weight. So not only are you converting from U.S. to metric measurements, but you're also converting volume to weight for everything other than liquids. And don't even get me started with converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius. I've memorized a lot of equivalents, but I have never been able to remember the damn formula. So part of making cooking and baking more pleasant experiences has been to create a conversion table for quick reference. So here's my little reference card, put together over the years*:

* Yes, it really did take me years. My old conversion table included all sorts of temperature and measurement increments that are pretty much never used in cooking, rendering them useless visual clutter. So this is really the streamlined version of the table I first made about 4 years ago.

repurposing beautiful things

2009-02-27T08:00:00.000+01:00

I've been super crafty recently, but I've neglected to post photos (or even take photos in the first place in most cases) of my projects. So here's a little peek into my wild and crazy life as a quasi-housewife.

I recently saw a tea towel from Green Gate that I simply had to have, but it was far too pretty to actually use as ... you know ... a kitchen towel. So I decided to make it into stuff. My first project was a tea cozy for my small teapot, which I use every morning for a personal portion of tea before moving on to the hard stuff ... er, coffee. I made my own pattern, inspired by Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing:

There was still quite a lot of the towel left, but I didn't know right away what I wanted to do with it. So I slept on it for a week or so. Then it came to me: an oven mitt and potholder. I already have a cute oven mitt with a rooster on it, but it's been singed a few dozen times and is starting to look worse for the wear. This time, I had no pattern or directions or tips, but it seemed like it would be simple enough to construct my own pattern. And it was: I only had to rip out one seam!

The pink trim is bias trim, and the red "loop" with the polka dots was actually part of the original tea towel. So I can't claim responsibility for that detail, although it was kinda tricky to work around the red loop so I could keep it. That'll stay my little secret.

baby's got snow

2009-02-26T23:12:00.002+01:00

Whee!! We've had so much snow this winter, much more than I ever remember having in Berlin. These pictures were taken the day before it all melted. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of Marie with her new sled(!), but with any luck, we'll get more snow this season, and then there will be sledding evidence.
Hooray for runny noses!

bedhead

2009-02-04T11:20:00.004+01:00

We're playing musical cold and flu bugs over here. First, Marie had bronchitis; then Toffi and I got colds; Toffi's cold turned into a painful sinus infection just as Marie got sick again; Toffi's now feeling mostly better, but Marie's still not quite well; and of course, now I have a painful sinus infection. So, in lieu of anything substantive, I give you evidence of how adorable bedhead can be on a sick toddler:

mmh-mama

2009-01-20T21:42:00.003+01:00

Toffi tried to get Marie to say "Obama" while we were watching the inauguration earlier. Marie's response sounded more like "mmh-mama."

Marie does have bronchitis, by the way, and an ear infection in both ears. She's taking antibiotics and starting to feel much better. The bad news is that Toffi and I are now starting to get sick ourselves, and as Marie's energy level and need for entertainment rises, our energy level and ability to entertain is sinking. This should be an interesting week!

the sickies

2009-01-18T13:04:00.001+01:00

Marie has been quite sick for five days now. High fever, persistant cough, fatigue, crankiness and no appetite. The works. I’m not sure why my paranoid self thought this, but my first suspicion when she suddenly developed a fever on Wednesday was measles. We’re delaying the MMR vaccine for a variety of reasons, mainly because our daughter developed such high fevers in reaction to her second and third round of boosters, and since she’s in daycare, there’s a realistic chance that she could get measles. But now it’s the fifth day and she has no rash, so it’s very unlikely that she’s got them. We saw the doctor on Friday to rule out a urinary tract infection and pneumonia. It’s probably just a pretty nasty upper respiratory infection. We were given a prescription for antibiotics just in case (as in, just in case it gets worse over the weekend and we want to do something before Monday morning but don’t want to take her to the hospital), but we haven’t given them to her yet. Anyway, Marie’s general misery has had an interesting side effect. Since she’s so tired and cranky and has practically no interest in playing pretty much all the time, we’ve taken to putting her in bed awake whenever we think she might be able to fall asleep and just telling her that she should try to get some rest. We leave the door open and tell her she can join us in the living room if she wants. She cries for about two seconds as we leave the room, then she stays there. This kind of compliance is totally unheard of in our spirited daughter. Any attempt to leave her awake in a dark room has always been met with the most fierce protest. But I guess she just feels so rotten right now that she’d rather get some rest than make a big fuss about not having a warm body next to her. We’ll see if this will last once she’s feeling better. My bet is on no.

woman's intuition

2009-01-15T15:14:00.001+01:00

I had a hair appointment scheduled for Wednesday, but over the weekend, I realized that the reason I thought I needed a haircut was not because I needed a haircut - in fact, all I needed was to start using conditioner. I guess my hair just reached that length at which I can’t just shampoo it and expect my ends to cooperate. Given that a bottle of conditioner costs a lot less than a haircut, I called the salon on Tuesday to cancel (it’s closed on Monday, otherwise I would have given more notice.). I recognized the owner’s voice on the phone and got a little nervous, so I told a little white lie. I didn’t say I had changed my mind - I said my daughter was sick, and I’d reschedule as soon as she was healthy again. I felt a little guilty making up this story, but it was too late.

Well, the next morning, when Marie came into our bedroom to nurse, I noticed she felt awfully warm. We took her temperature at her first diaper change and sure enough, 101.8 ° F (38.8 ° C). As the day wore on, her temperature rose, peaking at 103.5 ° F (39.7 ° C). She’s still got a fever today, and she’s not a happy camper. I know it’s silly and impossible given incubation times, but there’s this teeny little part of me that feels responsible for her getting sick because I used her fictional illness as an excuse, and then the fiction became reality. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Or did I just subconsciously sense that she was on her way to getting sick?

the building blocks of life

2009-01-13T20:14:00.000+01:00

Children can be so surprising sometimes. They’ll wake up one day and do something they’ve never done before, and they’ll do it so expertly that you’re apt to suspect they’ve been practicing in secret. I used to think that these sudden behavioral changes were mostly my fault.

For example: one day, after picking up our daughter from daycare, my husband chased the family dog with the stroller. Marie got a great laugh, but we immediately stopped taunting the dog. The chasing lasted 15 seconds, tops. The next day, Marie suddenly started chasing the dog around the house with her doll stroller. And she was shockingly good at it. She cornered poor Oko in all sorts of places, and with lightening speed, she maneuvered the stroller to block his escape route every time he tried to make a run for it. I’m convinced she would have done this for hours had I not locked the dog in the bedroom and hidden the doll stroller at the first opportunity. Right after locking the dog in the bedroom, but before getting the chance to take the stroller away (I had already made several attempts at getting Marie to willingly stop stalking the dog), Marie spent a good ten minutes ramming the stroller into the bedroom door, yelling, “Oko!” each time. What have I done? I thought in horror.

I now realize, however, that even though we parents are sometimes guilty of teaching our children to torture house pets and other heinous acts, children sometimes just come up with new tricks completely out of the blue and completely on their own. After all, they’re little budding personalities, discovering and exploring every day. And their surprises aren’t always exasperating, either:

Yesterday, after months and months of ignoring her lovely, wooden building blocks, Marie pulled out the box in which they’re kept and started stacking. I had never seen her do anything with those blocks except bang them together. And I can’t remember her ever stacking anything before. Today, again with no prompting on our part, she took them out again and started building towers, 7-8 blocks high. When Toffi and I noticed what she was doing this afternoon, all we could do was stare. And smile.

crunchy bottoms

2009-01-11T18:34:00.000+01:00

It’s amazing, but after cloth diapering Marie for over 19 months, I still haven’t written a single post about it! I’m still not there yet, but I thought I’d share Steph’s wonderful story about her foray into cloth diapering her fourth child, a beautiful girl named Ivy.

foaming at the mouth

2009-01-09T14:12:00.001+01:00

I'm going to be counting the days until March 24th. Of course, then I'll have to count the days it will take to have Dooce's new book sent to Germany.

i am woman ...

2009-01-08T19:56:00.001+01:00

... hear me roar!

Who Needs Women's Self-Empowerment Week?

don't wean - be healthy

2009-01-07T22:33:00.001+01:00

Several doses of lactation suppressants, a doctor's visit, a long-ass drive and a debilitating migraine later, I'm still breastfeeding Marie. While the mastitis was still raging, I spent a lot of time in bed thinking about what I should do. I was rather tempted to use the infection as an excuse to quit nursing cold turkey, but when I nursed Marie again, the thought of suddenly denying her broke my heart. I also started thinking about the many negative aspects of sudden weaning. While I probably wouldn't have had to worry about engorgement thanks to the lactation suppressants, I would still have to deal with rapidly falling hormone levels. I remembered reading that postpartum depression sometimes doesn't emerge until after weaning (making it even harder to diagnose), and after doing some research, I found the following at kellymom:

It's not unusual to feel tearful, sad or mildly depressed after weaning; some moms also experience mood swings. These feelings are usually short-term and should go away in a few weeks. This is caused, in part, by hormonal changes. One of the changes that occurs with weaning is a drop in prolactin levels. Prolactin, the hormone that stimulates milk production, also brings with it a feeling of well-being, calmness and relaxation. The faster the weaning process the more abrupt the shift in hormone levels, and the more likely that you will experience adverse effects. Moms who are forced to wean before they are ready (or for reasons beyond their control) and moms with a history of depression are also more likely to experience depression after weaning.

Kellymom also offers a link to this discussion about depression following weaning. Considering the fact that I am very prone to depression, it didn't seem like the greatest idea to up the ante by weaning so suddenly. I also started to think about just how hard weaning would be on Marie, who still loves nursing so much. I imagine what the first two weeks might be like. "Hell" was the first word that came to mind. I realized that although my body was screaming for more rest, less stress and a chance to recuperate from all the demands made of it over the past 2 1/2 years, weaning probably wouldn't solve the problem anyway. Marie would be just as demanding - and until she adjusted to the lack of nursing, she would probably be more demanding. Kellymom offers more wisdom:

It's important to be realistic about your expectations for weaning. Stopping breastfeeding does not make mothering any easier or force your child to grow up any faster. Your baby will still demand lots of your attention; supplying this in ways other than nursing can be challenging. Breastfeeding can be a real work saver when you can count on it as a surefire way of getting a baby to quiet down or sleep. Often there are ways other than total weaning to cope with mothers' feelings of restlessness or being tied down.

How true! If I were to wean Marie all of a sudden, how would I get the rest I so desperately needed? That was when I decided to go back to the doctor. Following her recommendations, my symptoms continued to get better, and the low dose of the lactation suppressant didn't cut into my supply so drastically as to cause any problems. The mastitis was completely gone within another 48 hours.

I now feel like I have had a near brush with weaning, but I can't't just go on as before. I really need to make some changes for the sake of my physical and mental health. On the drive back to Berlin, Toffi and I talked about what those changes would be. And here they are; you could call them my resolutions for 2009:

Go to bed early. This means sucking it up and admitting that although I am a night owl, I simply cannot afford to go to bed at midnight or later, night after night. I will aim to get ready for bed at 10, meaning I'll be in bed by 10:30. Realistically, this won't happen every night, but if I make it 5 out of 7 nights, it will make a big difference.
Eat nourishing food at every meal. Avoid empty calories. I am about 10-15 pounds underweight, and every time I step on a scale, I seem to have lost even more. I eat a lot, but I suspect I'm eating a lot of food with empty calories. Some people put on weight when they do this. I think I lose it. Most of the food we buy is locally grown, organic, healthy food. But it often spoils before we use it, and since we often don't plan ahead, we find ourselves hungry and in no mood to cook. The result is to eat something fast and unhealthy. Inspired by Half Pint Pixie, I started meal planning a few weeks before Christmas. I intend to continue this, as it has made it much easier to eat healthy, well-balanced meals every day. It has also made it easier to eat our meals together as a family, and we haven't thrown away any food since starting this either! My body needs all the nourishment it can get, so this is a big part of my plan.
Suspend all translation work while working on my thesis. I tend to bite off more than I can chew, and I think the best way to avoid it during the 3 months I have to write my thesis is to decide ahead of time that I simply will not work during that period. It will temporarily make our finances a little tight, but it will be worth it if I can make it through this time without losing my mind.
Strengthen my body. I walk a lot, but I don't do anything to strengthen my body anymore. I'm no longer into a lot of the high-impact sports I used to play in years past, but a weekly yoga course would do wonders for my creaky back. And as soon as the weather gets a little less sub-zero, I can add riding my bike to the mix. I've wanted to return to regular yoga for a long time now, but I've been postponing it for over a year, mainly because the Iyengar class I want to take is concurrent with Marie's bedtime. That brings me to the last part of my plan:
Night-wean Marie. I don't merely need more sleep. I need uninterrupted sleep. After over a year and a half of waking up every 2-3 hours at night, I simply can't go on. This means Toffi will take over the bedtime routine and all night wakings for a while. It will be hard, but we're hopeful.

I think these goals are not only far better than weaning Marie completely. I also think that regardless of the weaning question, they are necessary to improve my health. Even if I had decided to wean my daughter, I would still continue to waste away and suffer from poor health if I didn't make some major changes to my daily habits. And I'm convinced that if I'm healthier and better rested, I'll be much more capable of being an attentive mother and wife, and I will enjoy my days so much more.

"m" is for ...

2009-01-04T22:39:00.006+01:00

So I expected my first post of 2009 to be about making teddy bears rock out to Pearl Jam and other ways to keep small children entertained on long car trips - and believe me, I have gathered much expertise on that particular topic - but fate had other things in store for me.

We made the drive back to Berlin on the 30th, and in between making teddy bears dance and stopping at a rest-stop restaurant for some inedible Schnitzel, I got a headache. I had been battling a headache for several days thanks to my lovely case of mastitis (it's all cleared up, by the way), and I just figured this was some lingering headachiness combined with the wonderfully healthy air one breathes when riding in a car for six hours. I took some Ibuprofen. The headache got worse. In fact, the headache continued to get worse until about 6 am the next day when Toffi called the paramedics. I didn't have to go to the hospital, and I'm all better now; it turns out I had a massive migraine. The worst I've ever had. By far. Ever. The first time I've ever had to receive an injection for migraine pain. A doctor made a house call after the paramedics were able to assure Toffi my life wasn't in danger. The doctor was the one who established that it was a migraine, and he was pretty sure to have figured out the trigger. I recently had to refill my prescription for a medication I take regularly. For the first time, I got a generic version of the drug, and apparently, my body wasn't very happy about that. So this week, one of my most important tasks is to go back to the doctor that prescribes the medication to make sure she prescribes nothing but the original from now on. The 48 hours that that migraine had me in its grip were the most hellish hours of my life. Pain far worse than labor and childbirth. When I woke up on January 2nd without a headache, I was so happy I wanted to sing.

the hour of truth

2008-12-29T20:16:00.003+01:00

Warning: load of self-pity ahead. Also, possibly TMI. Read at own risk.

A few days ago, I started feeling a little funny. Faintness, weakness, hot and cold flashes. I thought maybe it was the stress of the holidays or an oncoming flu. I took my temperature a couple times and was baffled by the wildly varying readings until I realized the thermometer was broken. No fever; I just felt like crap. The next day, I felt fine. Toffi and I even went out on a date! After Marie was in bed, with her grandparents, aunt and even great-grandmother home to take over should she wake up, we went out to a Cuban restaurant, followed by meeting some friends in a pub. I felt hoarse on the way home, but I figured it was from practically shouting for 2 hours (it was reeeeally loud in that pub!).

When I woke up the next morning (yesterday), I felt like CRAP. I mean total CRAP-OLA. Sore throat, headache, unimaginable pain in my back and ribcage. I got up with Marie, had breakfast, we played, went for a walk with the dog, and around 11 am I just couldn't take it anymore. I then spent the rest of the day in bed. I came downstairs in the evening and had some cream of wheat. It was then that I noticed that my right breast was sore. I had a plugged duct. As if everything else wasn't already enough! I locked myself in the warm bathroom to try and see if I could express any milk. I could. And it was effing bloody. Bloody! I freaked out, dabbed at it with a tissue and showed the "evidence" to Toffi. We talked about how it could be that my milk was bloody and what should be done.

Luckily, my sister-in-law still has a gynecologist in her home town (I've been at my in-laws for the holidays), so we decided to call the doctor first thing in the morning and make an appointment. I woke up (today) feeling even worse. I needed help getting dressed, for pete's sake. Toffi helped me into the car, and off we went. Even though I didn't have to wait long at the doctor's, it was too long for me to sit upright in a chair - I had to be shown into an exam room so I could lie down while waiting. The doctor was great. Very friendly and warm. Very reassuring. I described all my symptoms, including the sore throat, which would have been unmistakable anyway since you can pretty much see my swollen glands at this point. I had been assuming that after seeing the gynecologist, I would have to see a GP or ear, nose and throat specialist, but the doctor immediately nodded and said, "yep, sounds like mastitis." Apparently, back pain, headaches, chills and hot flashes - and yes, even swollen glands and sore throat - can all be the result of a breast infection! Who would have thunk it?!

She said I had two options. I could either take antibiotics and continue breastfeeding. Or I could wean Marie with the help of lactation suppressants. Either route would treat the mastitis since it isn't advanced yet. She asked me whether I wanted to continue breastfeeding. In theory, yes, I said. She suggested the possibility that breastfeeding has become too much for my body, and that my weakened immune system is now more vulnerable to infections. Toffi and I have been suspecting as much for a couple weeks now, but up until this doctor's visit, I hadn't given any serious thought to weaning. I have to admit that I was very torn. On the one hand, I believe in child-led weaning. On the other hand, I am feeling so physically drained from breastfeeding, even without the mastitis. I thought about it briefly and said I would wean. She prescribed the lactation suppressants and said she had office hours tomorrow, in case I needed to see her again (did she foresee my having second thoughts?).

I took the first lactation suppressant and slept a couple hours, and I felt worlds better when I woke up. But then I nursed Marie, and my heart almost broke. I realized that while my body might be screaming for weaning, my heart is nowhere near ready. Never mind the fact that Marie is unlikely to take a sudden weaning particularly well. For the past five hours or so, I've been thinking about alternatives. Ways to make breastfeeding work for both of us. Ways to get more sleep and rest without weaning. Ways to be healthier and finally gain some weight (I've lost at least ten pounds over the past couple months, and you could now definitely call me underweight).

I'm not sure, but I'm leaning toward going back to the doctor tomorrow and asking her to prescribe the antibiotics after all. Fortunately, any reduction in milk supply resulting from one or two lactation suppressants is easily reversable. I think I'll use this experience as an opportunity to reevaluate nursing, initiate a long-term weaning process (I'll definitely start with night weaning) and take more responsibility for my own well-being.

merry christmas!

2008-12-25T21:36:00.003+01:00

We've been having a lovely Christmas here, and I'd love to tell you more, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow or the next day. I'll just leave you with these two pictures: Marie helping hang ornaments on the tree (traditionally in Germany, the tree isn't set up and decorated until Christmas Eve), and Marie and her Papa taking a nap on Christmas Day.

hanky-panky

2008-12-21T19:30:00.002+01:00

You may remember that I wrote about joining Crunchy Domestic Goddess' Ditch the Disposables Challenge a few months ago. I decided that I would trade disposable Swiffer cloths for reusable prefold diapers and paper tissues for reusable cloth handkerchiefs. So, how have I fared? Incredibly well, I'm happy to say!

The Swiffer cloth trade-in hasn't been much of a big deal, as I rarely use the Swiffer, but using handkerchiefs has definitely been a big change. I made my handkerchiefs by cutting up two cotton jersey pillow cases. This was super easy, since I didn't even have to hem the squares I cut. The biggest problem I had at the beginning was how to store them. I didn't want to just keep a stack of them lying around. Keeping them in a drawer would have been too inconvenient. I needed something simple and fast. My solution was an empty baby wipes container. I cut out the feeder in the opening, making enough room to pull out the handkerchiefs. I can refill it from the bottom and pull out single squares through the opening in the top. This has made all the difference in the world, and it's so convenient to use them that even Toffi has started using them (most of the time). When I'm out and about with Marie, I always have two in my coat pockets - one for her and one for me. I cut some of the handkerchiefs larger than the rest, and these are the ones I usually take on outings since they last longer. I wash them with our whites, and they always come out looking good as new. And the best part? They're gentler on the nose than even the softest paper tissue. So even when I've got a cold (like today) and have to blow my nose 140 times a day, my nose doesn't get all red, dry and flaky. I'm happy to call this experiment a resounding success!

doh!

2008-12-18T10:51:00.001+01:00

You know what is so hilarious about that picture of Marie with the chocolate all over her?

The bib hanging on the side of her high chair.

I just noticed that for the first time.

silence is golden

2008-12-17T13:29:00.003+01:00

Sometimes I'm not sure what we did before Marie started going to daycare. We had her at home last Friday, as well as this Monday and Tuesday, and it seriously almost killed us. She had a stomach thing - nothing really bad, but still the kind of thing where you keep your kid at home lest you be to blame for 10 other toddlers getting a virus. Plus, she's been incredibly cranky recently. When we picked her up from daycare last Thursday, the caretakers said she'd been crying on and off all day, falling apart at the slightest provocation. We first blamed her tummy bug, but now that she's healthy and her mood hasn't really improved, it seems clear that her cranky-pants attitude has a lot to do with a huuuuuuuge developmental leap: she's talking.

By her first birthday, Marie could pretty much say 3 words: Mama, Papa and Oko. Then, nothing really happened. She began using those words with more purpose, but no new words came. Then, about two weeks ago, "Schlüssel" and "bear" were added to the mix. "Bear" seemed pretty logical: she adores teddy bears. Other stuffed animals are clearly inferior. But "Schlüssel?" It means "key," and really isn't the easiest word to pronounce. But Marie also loves keys, holding them, carrying them, giving them to you at the right moment so you can unlock something, wearing a lanyard keychain around her neck. So I guess it's not strange that it's one of her first words. Still, "key" is a helluva lot easier to pronounce than its German counterpart!

And since the middle of last week, she's suddenly started talking like a parrot, saying all sorts of words we say, and clearly, knowing exactly what they mean: "ball," "peepee," "Ampel" (means traffic light), "Cheerios" (although her version sounds more like "cheechee"), "Marie" (sounds like "Mamie"), "shoes," "chair," "open," "tea," "eye," "ear" and probably a number of others that are eluding me at the moment. She's having a veritable language explosion, and it seems to be consuming her so completely that she has no energy or patience left for anything else. She's been having a zillion temper tantrums a day, wants to nurse nonstop through the night and has refused to take naps. The last one is probably the one that has tortured us the most. When Marie is home all day, we thrive on the fact that she sleeps for 1-2 hours in the middle of the day. Sometimes we nap with her. Other times, it's just good to have an hour or two of quiet. But when she won't nap or will only nap in the stroller, as was the case the past two days, we do not have even a tiny little break. And since she really neeeeds that nap, we trudge out through the gray cold so she can snooze. And forget about getting any work done. I wasn't able to translate at all or work on my thesis or attend my research colloquium. Toffi had to work a little, and he did almost all of it at night. So by the end of the day, when she's finally in bed, it's all we can do to eat dinner and fall into bed ourselves. But of course, with her all-night nursing, going to bed hasn't brought much relief for me.

Anyway, this morning, we took Marie to the doctor to make sure she's healthy again, then off to daycare. She had a little separation anxiety when I left her there, but overall, she seemed so happy to be there. "Hooray!" her face seemed to say, "now I can play with other kids and grownups who aren't sleep-deprived zombies like you losers!" Toffi and I walked back home, unlocked the apartment door, and Toffi summed it up when he said, "ah, the silence. The promise of what we can do now: sleep, shower, eat breakfast without our coffee getting cold. The possibilities are endless. The quiet. The peacefulness."

Amen.

this is what happens ...

2008-12-09T14:18:00.002+01:00

... when you give little people chocolate.

housekeeping

2008-12-02T12:06:00.002+01:00

So I'm sitting here with a cup of English breakfast tea on a gray, early-December day and realizing a few things:

• I wish I had the time and energy to post more on my blog. There's all sorts of stuff going on in my brain that I want to write about and share with y'all, and yet somehow, the vast majority of it never makes it to my blog.
• I looooooooooove the holiday season. Yes, it's a bit stressful with all the oh-crap-what-am-I-going-to-give-so-and-so panic, but the music! and the colors! and the lights! and the fun! Having a small child really helps remind you how magical the holidays can be before you get old enough to notice extended family infighting and have to actually pay for all the gifts you give others.
• I am soooo incredibly not motivated to write my damn thesis. I have committed myself to writing it this semester (i.e. by March), and at this point, it's really just a chore that I want to get over with. I'm much more interested in redecorating the apartment, putting some finishing touches on Marie's room, working on some sewing projects and spending time with Marie, Toffi and that annoying dog...er...Oko. Do I sound a bit domestic? Damn right, I do!
• I miss you guys! All you wonderful friends who mean so much to me! I have all these emails in my head that I want to write to you, but the time! It just slips through my fingers. I hope you won't give up on me. One of these days there'll be a tome from me in your inbox, and I'll tell you all the things I've been wanting to share. Or at least the things I haven't forgotten by then. Mommy brain can be a bitch like that.

wtf

2008-11-17T12:50:00.004+01:00

I had coffee with two girlfriends the other day. One of them has a son 2 months older than Marie, and it seems he has discovered the wonderful world of biting. Someone takes away his toy? He bites. Someone has something he wants? He bites. Biting is his knee-jerk reaction to any situation that upsets him. As troubling as this is, it's pretty normal behavior for toddlers; they have strong emotions but lack the language skills and self-control to express them appropriately, so they quickly resort to biting, hitting, scratching and plain ol' tantrum-throwing as a way of releasing their frustration. This doesn't make the behavior acceptable, but it helps to know that a biting one-and-a-half-year-old isn't a "bad" kid - he's just not mature enough to handle upsetting situations in an appropriate way.

So my friend's son bit Marie a number of times. Enough, in fact, that she started avoiding him completely and rushing to me any time he came too close for comfort. He bit some other kids at the mommy café, too. My friend responded appropriately, I felt. She stepped in, told him, "no biting!" had him give his "victims" a hug, and tried to distract him any time she felt a conflict coming on. The only thing I might have done differently is to have reassured him that I understood his frustration. Something like, "I know you're upset that Marie has a cookie, but it's not OK to bite. If you ask for one, you can have a cookie, too."

A middle-aged woman walked by with her baby grandson. My friend was hovering because she was afraid her son would bite the baby. This led to a brief conversation with the grandma about biting behavior. She had this bit of "wisdom" to share:

"I had three kids, and all of them went through that phase. Don't worry, it's normal. I found that the only way to stop it was to bite them so they would learn how much it hurts. I know it sounds bad, but it worked immediately! My oldest took over the job with his two younger siblings so that I wouldn't have to bite my own child. Obviously, they were hurt and shocked, but they never bit again!"

It was one of those just-smile-and-nod moments for me, but on the inside, I was telling this woman, "oh sure, I'll bite my own child to teach her a lesson ... WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER!"

As shocked as I was, this advice is more common than I would have imagined. Apart from the fact that I would like to avoid being the reason for any child of mine feeling "shocked and hurt," I also wouldn't want my child to get the idea that since mommy bites, it's OK to bite. Elizabeth Pantley explains why this is such a bad idea:

Don’t bite your child back to “show him how it feels.” He isn’t purposefully hurting his playmate. He doesn’t understand that what he did is wrong, so by responding with the same action you may actually be reinforcing that this is an acceptable behavior, or confusing him entirely.

I don't adhere to any one parenting philosophy thought up and written down by some pediatrician or guru. I prefer to follow my own instincts, refering to parenting guides when I need help or suggestions for concrete steps I can take to act on those instincts. But I would also say that most of the time, what I believe pretty much matches the princples of attachment parenting, a philosophy that shies away from forcing independence on small children, which encourages parents to respect children as individual human beings (thus, acknowledging the legitimate feelings that caused the inappropriate biting behavior), and reminds us that so many "undesireable" behaviors in children are really just normal behaviors that adults view as being annoying and inconvenient.

As far as I know, Marie has not begun biting other children, but I realize she may pick it up at some point. If and when she does, I know it won't be easy for me to respond without losing my cool. I know it will probably take a lot of patience and many interventions before she learns to express her frustration without trying to take a chunk out of another child's skin. I'm not 100% sure what my strategy will be, but thanks to the woman in the café, I know exactly what I won't do!

For Elizabeth Pantley's full response on what to do and what not to do about a biting toddler, see this Q & A.

back in the day

2008-11-13T11:00:00.003+01:00

When I look at this photo, it seems like it was taken just yesterday, but it was actually over a year ago! How time flies with the little people!

better than pjs

2008-11-10T19:05:00.008+01:00

In honor of International Babywearing Week, I give you this adorable image of Marie and her papa. It wasn't so long ago that she still had to be "worn" to sleep for naps, and Toffi would often succumb to sleep himself after he had successfully gotten Marie to fall asleep. This photo also features the sling I sewed myself. I made it so Toffi would have an easier time rocking Marie to sleep.

Our Ergo Baby Carrier is great for taking walks, but not as great at lulling a baby to sleep. So I did a little research, took Toffi's measurements, and in an amazingly short time, we had a fantastic sleeping aid!

This is one of my favorite babywearing pictures from our family, but there are so many more amazingly precious photos over here , at Adventures in Babywearing. You should really check them out (and prepare to get all sappy - bring Kleenex)!

Also, take a look at these stylish slings and wraps. One of the bloggers posting a babywearing photo or story will be winning one!

the terrible seventeens

2008-11-07T20:18:00.002+01:00

Can someone please tell me: if the terrible twos are still to come, what exactly is going on with Marie right now, at seventeen months? We are in tantrum and tears hell, people. Even the caregivers at nursery school are surprised at the force of her temper tantrums. When we mention to people that she's been having fits of rage and bursts into tears whenever anything doesn't go her way - and I really mean anything - they're more than just a little surprised that this is happening before Marie has even hit the one-and-a-half mark. Regardless, she's our sweet, wonderful, beautiful, loveable darling girl, and every day, she gives us a hundred more reasons to love and cherish her completely. And to remind ourselves just how adorable she is, we always have photos like this that capture the moment of her unbelieveable, ladylike charm.

2008-11-04T21:27:00.001+01:00

VOTE!

nesting, revisited

2008-10-23T21:06:00.010+02:00

Yikes. October's close to being over, and I haven't posted since September! I'll spare you the detailed list of excuses for my silence and just give you the essential bullet points:

• we visited my in-laws for a week;
• after getting back to Berlin, Marie developed a kidney infection;
• Toffi was in Vienna on business while I was caring for a very miserable Marie;
• as Marie got better and Toffi came home, I succumbed to an unforgiving stomach bug;
• and then, after not working for over two weeks, I desperately needed to do some translation work.

So, now that things are back to some version of normal, I can tell you about some things that have made the Susie Homemaker part of me very happy.

When we moved in, we had two couches that looked like this:

and this:

Never mind the fact that they didn't match each other - they didn't match anything in the whole damn apartment. But since we didn't have the money to buy new couches, I decided to make covers for them. This is what they look like now:

But it's been quite a journey. I had no pattern for these. I designed them in my head, sketched them out on a scrap of paper, and after roughly calculating how much fabric I would need, I picked up this heavy cotton twill at Ikea, of all places. That was about a year and a half ago. I pre-washed the fabric and put it in a drawer.

My first creation was this skirt for the raised platform in our living room. I started making it at 5 am one morning at the peak of my nesting craziness shortly before Marie was born. I remember a bleary-eyed Toffi wandering into the living room at about 7:30, wondering what in god's name I was doing at such an inhuman hour of the morning. I finished the project that same day, and then, the remaining fabric hung out in its drawer for a few more months.

I made the futon cover when Marie was about 3 months old. Thinking back on it, it was simple as it gets, but at the time, it seemed like quite a challenge. It basically consists of two large pieces sewn together where the seat meets the back of the futon. The back piece drapes all the way down the back side as well, and is joined to its own front by a long, thin panel on both ends of the futon back. Everything was accurately measured and hemmed fairly carefully, and that's about it.

The other couch was much more daunting. Maybe that's why I only just finished it last week - I was a little intimidated. Once I started, it didn't take that long, but I didn't start until a little less than a month ago. The seat cushion is a perfect rectangle, but the back is a trapezoid, as are the arm rests. Since I didn't want the fabric to drape down to the floor for this couch, I had to be much more meticulous in measuring and hemming to make sure all the hems were even, parallel to the floor while still hiding the blue fabric underneath. This cover is also two pieces sewn together, but this time the seam is along the top edge of the back. The top corners of the back are sewn, but the fabric then parts about 8 inches down, from which point onward the front and back are tied together. This was the only way to have a tight-fitting cover that could be pulled over those wacky corners. I guess I could have used zippers, but I hate sewing them.

The arm rests had me stumped. They're trapezoids, they have metal bars coming out of them (attaching them to the main couch), and like the main cover, I wanted to make sure I could remove the covers to wash them. So instead of trying to design their covers beforehand, I just designed as I went. By gosh and by golly, I wrapped and pinned fabric around these babies, and finally came up with something that worked. The outer corners are sewn, the inner ones are gathered and folded. The underside is mostly uncovered, which isn't a big deal since you'd pretty much have to crawl underneath them like an auto mechanic to see their bellies. I put rivets along the seams here, and threaded ribbon through them so that the cover could be pulled together tightly onto the cushion. The perfectionist in me sort of wishes I had spent more time on finding a way to finish the arm rests that would look cleaner, but let's face it: I'm impatient as hell, and I always get to a point where I'm sick of a project hanging over my head and I just want it to be effing DONE. And that's when I settle for something that seems pretty perfect, so long as you don't examine it too closely.

Finally having these couches done has really improved our living room dramatically. We have a lot of black and white in the room, and the blue just wasn't jiving. And the futon had such an unattractive red wine stain on it that I had always just thrown a large blanket over it, a blanket that didn't match anything either. But now that this file has been closed, it seems to have freed up space in that part of my brain that obsesses about home improvement projects. My new preoccupation, which came on quite out of the blue and smacked me with full force, is that I want to convert our office into a room for Marie. I suddenly feel like it's time for her to have her own room, and this will mean a LOT of reshuffling of furniture, getting rid of some things and buying a few new ones. But mostly, it means that - wheeeee!! - I get to rearrange and redecorate!

in love

2008-09-26T21:49:00.003+02:00

My sister in law's boyfriend has a new camera, and some weeks ago, he took this picture of Marie. See those eyes? They're only one of many reasons why even after the worst of nights or temper tantrums, I cannot help but be totally and completely in love with my little girl!

ditch the disposables

2008-09-11T13:16:00.000+02:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a week or so now, but I was a little too consumed by my upcoming driver's test to actually do so. Crunchy Domestic Goddess is doing another green living challenge, this time, to replace 2 types of disposable household items with reusable, greener options. In CDG's words:

"We live in a society of convenience, where throw-away products are the norm rather than the exception. But all of the disposable products take resources and energy to produce and then, of course, get thrown away, filling up our landfills. All of this is bad news for the environment."

She goes on to provide a list of common disposable items that you could choose to give up. A lot of them are things we have already learned to do without. For example, Marie wears cloth diapers instead of disposables, we have reusable water bottles and I use mama cloth instead of disposable menstrual pads/tampons. So the 2 items I have chosen to give up are Swiffer cloths and tissues. As a replacement, I'm using prefold cloth diapers for the Swiffer, and I cut up an old pillow case to make about 20 handkerchiefs that I've been using to wipe Marie's nose (at the moment, she's the only one in the house who has a runny nose). So far, so good. What could you learn to live without?

yyyyesssssss!!!

2008-09-10T09:57:00.002+02:00

After living in Germany for five years, I will FINALLY be allowed to drive a car here! That's right folks - I passed my German driving test with flying colors, and now there's only one more bureaucratic hoop to jump through before I am in possession of a German driver's license! YEAH!!!

The process has been costly (all told, I calculated that it cost me about 600 €), even though I was "only" trading in my California license for a German one. It has also taken a long time. I applied for my German license two years ago, but what with being pregnant and working on a university degree and working as a translator, I didn't get around to taking the written test until a year ago. And after Marie was born, I didn't have the time to do any practice sessions with a driving instructor. But once Marie was settled in daycare, I finally did some practice sessions, and yesterday, the test. Compared to this test, the one I took in California ten years ago was a joke! The test here lasts 45 minutes, involves parking in 3 different ways (including parallel parking), is done on a manual transmission, and often takes you through sticky situations. If I had taken this text ten years ago, I'm almost certain I would have failed. But after 10 years of driving experience (notwithstanding the last 5 years, in which I only drove when I was not in Germany) and my 5 practice sessions with a great instructor, I think I'm a better driver now. In any case, I'm legally ALLOWED to drive in this country!

tagged!

2008-09-04T19:30:00.002+02:00

Half Pint Pixie has tagged me with a meme, so here goes:

1. What I was doing 10 years ago:

Ten years ago, I was just beginning my last year of high school in Sacramento, California. I had spent the summer deliriously happy, since the boy I had been desperately in love with had recently declared his love to me. The first few months of that relationship were bliss, and we would stay together for a year and a half. But another relationship would prove to last much longer. Ten years ago, I also met Amanda, who would go on to become my best friend. We attended the same high school, and later, the same university. Even though there's an ocean between us now, we are still the closest of friends. I spent that summer listening to a lot of Sublime, Bad Religion, Tom Petty and Rage Against the Machine. I still listen to these bands' music, but probably Rage Against the Machine most of all. Toffi and I went to see them live shortly after Marie's first birthday. It was our first night out as a couple in almost a year!

2. What 5 things are on on my to-do list for today (in no particular order):

• Have Toffi take Marie to daycare so I can sleep in and recover from my sore throat/cold/flu.
• Get a hold of my sister-in-law and ask her to pick Marie up from daycare so I can stay inside and spare myself the strain of a 40-minute round-trip walk.
• Call my driving instructor and ask him to reschedule my driving test for two weeks earlier than originally planned because I somehow managed to mix up the deadline (I blame it on breastfeeding mommy brain).
• Watch Sense & Sensibility for the umpteenth time.
• Find out whether my sore throat tea is safe for breastfeeding, and if so, drink as much of it as possible!

3. Snacks I enjoy:

• peanut butter and banana sandwiches
• fresh-baked bread with a thick layer of butter
• tomato salad with balsamic vinegar and oil
• Greek yogurt with peaches and honey
• strong black tea with shortbread, biscuits or some other sweet thing

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

• pay off my parents' mortgage
• pay off my friends' college loans
• buy a house on a large piece of property with plenty of room for gardens, tree houses and animals
• start a foundation for the benefit of victims of rape and domestic violence
• start a foundation to assist low-income families in making their homes more energy efficient

5. Places I have lived:

• London, England
• Ulm, Germany
• Sacramento, California, United States
• Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Berlin, Germany

I now tag Jen, Sarah, Broken Man and anyone else who has a fancy to play!

the sound of freedom

2008-09-02T19:58:00.002+02:00

They say the love a mother feels for her child(ren) is uniquely powerful, and I can only confirm that it is so. My love for Marie is like no other love I have felt. It is primal and intense, as well as tender and gentle. It was hard at first to leave Marie at daycare. I barely slept the night before her first day, even though I knew I wouldn't be leaving her there alone until the 3rd or 4th day. It has definitely been a challenge to let go. But now that Marie spends 5 hours there each weekday, willingly takes naps with the other tots and barely flinches when I say goodbye in the mornings, I have to admit something:

I absolutely love shopping with neither Marie nor the dog in tow.

Granted, I can't turn off the instinctive reaction I have whenever I hear a baby cry - I am constantly on alert - but there is something glorious about being in the grocery store ALONE. A child cries, but it is NOT MINE. A dog barks, but it is NOT MINE. It is not my child who is in distress; it is not my dog who is getting into trouble. That? Why, that is the sound of freedom, my friend.

ignorance breeds even more ignorance

2008-08-30T19:23:00.010+02:00

I had a conversation at Marie's daycare center this past week that really saddened me. I went there to pick her up, and while I was putting her shoes on, one of the caregivers mentioned that Marie rarely ate the veggies on her plate and asked whether she eats veggies at home. I said that Marie had, indeed, developed a new skepticism toward vegetables in recent weeks. She often only eats them if they're somehow "hidden" in other food. But I also said I wasn't too concerned by it because I still breastfeed her, and I know she's getting enough vitamins. Eventually, I figure, she'll start eating some vegetables again.

There was only one other mom there, as most of the other kids in Marie's group had already been picked up. She has 18-month-old twins and seems to me like a nice woman and good mother. When she heard me talk about breastfeeding Marie, she asked, almost incredulously, "vitamins in breastmilk?!" "Well, yeah," I said. She shook her head in a sort of exaggerated way (I think she's so used to talking to small children that she tends to talk to adults like this too without realizing it.) and asked how old Marie is. "Almost 15 months," I told her. She shook her head again and said, "then she's not getting any vitamins from the milk anymore." She went on to tell me about a friend of hers who was still breastfeeding her young toddler. The child was in the hospital for some illness (I didn't catch what it was), and apparently, the mother had been scolded by the doctors for continuing to breastfeed her child! They said the child was starving and needed to be eating more "real" food. According to the doctors, breastmilk provides no nutrients once the child is over a year old.

Now first of all, this is just patently false. This is one of the persistent, but totally silly myths about breastfeeding. I don't know how it got started, but it's ridiculous. A mother continues to produce milk as long as there is a demand for it. It's not as though all the milk is made when the baby is born and it "expires" at some point later in time.

Second, the World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding until a child is at least two years old. Yes, YEARS. The WHO is only one of many organizations who recognize the many benefits of breastfeeding past 12 months of age.

Third, what the EFF is a medical practitioner doing spewing such rubbish?!?!?!?! Seriously, I have heard tell of many doctors giving stupid advice regarding breastfeeding, and I have had my own experiences of this kind, but most of these incidents had something to do with the safety of breastfeeding while taking certain medications, after surgical procedures, etc. Often, these doctors weren't aware of the most recent research on these issues (which, of course, is no excuse), and so they erred on the side of caution and told moms (myself included) not to breastfeed or to wean early. But this woman's experience seems even worse to me. This is a medical professional giving credit to absolute hooey, while simultaneously suggesting that this mother's decision to continue to provide her toddler breastmilk was the reason for her child's illness! That poor woman! I wish I could give her a hug!

Fourth, the way the twins' mom conveyed this information to me made it obvious that she trusted the doctor 100%, and this gave me the impression that her friend had believed the doctor's "information" too; otherwise, she wouldn't have told the twins' mom about it in a way that resulted in the latter believing it. Which means that at least two women were now convinced of this fallacy, and who knows how many other women they'll (mis)inform.

Now, just to make it clear, this conversation didn't lesson my opinion of the twins' mom in any way. I have no idea whether she breastfed them or not, but I firmly believe that breastfeeding is choice that every mom needs to make for herself, and I have no right to judge that decision, especially if she has multiples, which definitely makes breastfeeding harder. So, if I assume that she only breastfed for a few weeks or months, it wouldn't be surprising if she never ventured to read up on extended breastfeeding. And theoretically, why shouldn't she trust her friend and her friend's doctor to give her accurate information? The only villian in this story is that damn doctor, who was not only irresponsible in a medical sense, since he gave false information, but also on a human level, since he directly or indirectly accused the child's mother of being guilty of making her child sick. Something which she is not likely to have taken lightly. And lastly, his* ignorance translates into other people's ignorance since his opinion as an "authority" has a high likelihood of being trusted and will be spread by word of mouth.

Not wanting to start an argument at the daycare center, I kept my reply fairly neutral. I pointed out that Marie does not get breastmilk exclusively, that she eats 5 small meals of "real" food a day and that breastmilk is something she gets on top of that. I did say that breastmilk does, in fact, have vitamins in it, but I didn't make a point of saying that the doctor's information was wrong. On the way home, though, I was fuming inside. I felt so horrible for the woman who took her child to the hospital, only to be scolded for giving her child the most nutritious drink in the world! I'd like to think that this was an unusual occurence, but I fear it's not, since breastfeeding figures in Germany aren't spectacular - I think extended breastfeeding figures are even lower that in the U.S. - and in a cultural sense, Germans tend to be completely trusting of "experts." Anyone wearing a white lab coat must be telling the absolute truth

... except when they're not.

Here are Marie and I sleeping after having finished nursing one evening shortly after her first birthday. How could anyone say that this is wrong?!

* I happen to know it was a male doctor - I'm not merely making that assumption.

giving in to giving

2008-08-26T19:18:00.002+02:00

I was a little shy about nursing in public when Marie was a newborn, and since she spent those first couple months nursing almost constantly, I rarely ventured outside for more than a short walk with the dog. But I couldn't stay cooped up for long, and since the alternative to nursing in public was for Marie to cry and fuss, I got over my shyness and decided to go for it. Once I got comfortable with it, I was anything but modest. I was too impatient to deal with covers, and I hated the idea of retreating to some obscure corner, so a lot of strangers got to see my nipples. Big deal. It really didn't bother me at all, and I enjoyed nursing my baby in public almost as much as I did so in privacy.

But now that Marie is older, I don't really enjoy nursing her in public anymore. She squirms, she's distracted, she laughs and points at things around us, and she likes to switch from one breast to the other several times within a short nursing session. Combine that with the fact that people look at me more anyway since Marie is a toddler now, and we attract a lot of attention. So I try to avoid going out when I know Marie is likely to want to nurse soon, and when she won't settle for anything less, we find a way to head home ASAP. This almost always works.

Yesterday was one of those days where it didn't work. Marie had slept badly the night before and had gotten up at 6:20 that morning, which is about an hour earlier than usual. When I picked her up from daycare, her caregiver informed me that she had only napped for half an hour. So she had at least a 2-hour sleep deficit. Nonetheless, she was in a great mood and had been for pretty much the whole day. I grabbed her stuff, she waved bye-bye to her caregiver and off we went. Except then I had to set her down so I could rearrange the stuff I was holding so that I could go get our stroller from the center's "stroller garage." Marie did not like this. Not one bit. As I set her down she arched her back and screamed, writhing her way out of my arms, then clinging to my legs, then making herself dead weight when I tried to pick her up again. When I had her in arms again, I tried to soothe her and explain that I just needed to grab the stroller and was now ready to hold her for however long she needed. She settled down a little, but not really. I tried sitting her in her stroller, thinking she might settle while watching the world go by. After walking about 200 feet it was clear this wasn't going to happen. So I grabbed the sling from the diaper bag (a New Native Baby Carrier, which is not our normal carrier, but which fits in pretty much any bag, making it perfect for emergencies like this) and lifted her into it. Well, I tried to lift her in, but her writhing made it difficult, and it ended up taking quite a while before I really had her in the sling.

Once I was no longer struggling to get her squirmy legs into the sling, she calmed down again, but as we continued walking, she kept crying and pulling frantically at my shirt. For a brief moment, the thought, "but we don't nurse outside anymore" went through my mind, but before that thought had an opportunity to pass across my lips, I asked myself, "why?" Sure, I don't enjoy nursing Marie in public that much anymore, but that doesn't mean I need to have an iron-clad "no-nursing-in-public" rule. Especially not when my sleep-deprived little girl is desperate for some relief from whatever frustration she's feeling! So I unhooked my nursing bra and pulled down my shirt (the neckline was just barely low enough to make this possible), and I got Marie latched on. And since she was so tired and unhappy, all she did was nurse. No popping off to look around, point at things or laugh and babble. I did get a few looks, but none of those passers-by saw my nipples - they just saw a woman walking and nursing a baby.

Marie and I made it home without any crying or fussing, and I was so glad that I had given in. And I mean "giving in" in a positive way, as putting my ego aside and giving in to someone else's need. I gave in so that I could give her what she needed.

the post with no title because i can think of no title

2008-08-15T20:24:00.005+02:00

As usual, it's been a while since I've posted. But things are going pretty well over here.

My skin is looking better, and although I've had a few days where I haven't been 100% kind to my skin, my efforts to be good to it have been mostly successful. I think one thing that's made a big difference is that I've given myself permission to have bad days, setbacks and relapses. I've accepted that this will be a process, and just because I screw up on one day, it doesn't mean I've failed and so I might as well give up. Mistakes are human, my skin will never be perfect, the important thing is to learn to accept my skin the way it is, no matter how long it takes. To make the whole effort a bit more fun, I invested in a couple new skincare products. I had already been using a moisturizer by Payot, so I decided to try some other products from the same line. I have now fallen in love with this alcohol-free toner. I didn't use toner for years because it seemed like all the formulations for oily and combination skin had alcohol in them, and I had figured out that alcohol-based toners wreck my skin. But this one is clarifying and alcohol-free, smells nice and fresh and makes my skin feel soooo soft.

In other news, Marie has started going to daycare/nursery school, and it's going really well! This was her second week, and she's totally got the hang of the new routine. When she sees me grab her shoes in the morning, she rushes over to me, grinning from ear to ear, and plops down in my lap so I can put them on her. Then she toddles to the door and starts banging on it with her hands as if to say, "come on, hurry up! It's time to go! Slowpokes!" Then we take her to the nursery school and leave her for about 2 1/2 hours. She cries every time I leave, but by the time I've left the building, she's already stopped. When I pick her up at 11:30, she's so exhausted she almost always falls asleep on the way home. She's in a group of 14 kids, aged 6 - 18 months, and so far, I think all the other kids and parents are really nice. And even though she's in the middle of the age range, she's the only one who can eat with a spoon all by herself! So I guess the fact that she stopped allowing us to feed her several months ago has had a silver lining. What an independent little girl we have!

And speaking of the little tyke, Marie is now walking, climbing and going up- and downstairs like a pro. Okay, the downstairs part is still kinda scary, but if she holds my hand, she usually does just fine. She's still not really talking, but she says "Oko" every time she sees a dog. She likes collecting rocks from the courtyard in our building. Any time we go anywhere we have to wait for her to stoop down and collect her daily ration of stones before she finally toddles out to the front of the building to meet us. She also loves giving kisses. In fact, she loves it so much that she woke me up a few mornings ago by giving me a kiss. Do you have any idea how unbelievably amazing it is to be woken up by a sweet little baby kiss on the lips? I thought I was just going to burst with love!

it's for my own good, too

2008-07-25T17:06:00.003+02:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled lack of posting for this message from your hostess:

Those of you who know me personally probably know that I suffer (on several levels) from adult acne. Those of you who know me well - or are just very observant - know that my acne would be a lot less severe if I didn't compulsively pick at, prod, squeeze, scratch and otherwise aggravate the blemishes on my face. As of yesterday, I am making a renewed effort at changing this behavior.

I didn't always pick at my face. I started getting zits when I was about 12, and I think you could say I had a normal course of teenage acne - annoying, but not really that bad. In the early years, I never, ever popped zits - not even the juicy ripe ones. I knew that popping them could lead to infection and scarring. And besides, it hurt to pop them and I was a wimp. I'm not sure what changed in my last year of high school, but it was then that I began to not only regularly pop pimples, but also to pick at them with my fingernails while I was sitting in class, doing homework or even driving. And once I started, it really seemed rather impossible to stop. The problem got worse in college. When I was studying for a particularly difficult exam, I would absentmindedly pick at my face until I noticed that it was bleeding. Not surprisingly, my skin was always in horrible condition after finals week.

When I was 20, my acne began to get significantly worse. And as the condition got worse, so did the picking and squeezing behavior. The acne spread to my back and chest, and I started wearing makeup to hide not only the acne, but also the effects of my obsession with it. The condition really began to take over my brain. I couldn't go out in public without thinking about my skin, what people were probably thinking when they saw my skin and how desperately I longed for soft, smooth skin. After returning from a year abroad, I finally saw a dermatologist and started topical treatment. This improved things, especially on my back and chest, but the following academic year, my last in college, would prove to be such an emotional roller coaster that the problem reached a whole new dimension. I no longer merely picked absentmindedly or squeezed zits that I shouldn't have - I quite literally dug into my skin with my fingernails on a regular basis, squeezing the very life out of my pores. I had a large patch of nearly purple skin on my left cheek for months, simply because I couldn't leave it alone. It was clear to me that things were getting out of control, so I went back to the dermatologist, went back on the Pill and went in for a few facials. I was also determined to start treating my skin with more respect. By the summer, my skin was looking much better.

Since that year, I've had my ups and downs. There have been times when my skin behaves and I am able to leave it alone for the most part. There are times when I have acne flareups and am still able to avoid doing too much damage. And then there are the times when for reasons usually related to stress or unhappiness, I go to town on my skin. Fortunately, the problem never again got to be as bad as it was during my senior year of college. But the problem persists. I've talked to my therapist about it at length, and it's clear to us that it's partially a nervous habit, a way of releasing stress, but it's also partially a complicated matter of self-esteem. Up until now, both my habit and my numerous attempts to break it have had their roots in negative motivations; it's a self-destructive, self-punishing habit, and each time I try to "finally stop, once and for all," I berate myself for having the problem in the first place. No wonder none of these attempts has ever really lasted.

I hope that will change now. Two days ago, I had an epiphany. In fact, when this realization hit me, I was amazed that I had never had this thought before. It suddenly occurred to me that by watching me do this to myself, Marie could (almost certainly would) get the wrong message about being good to your body. And I don't want Marie to have this kind of relationship with her body and/or skin. I've been living with this skewed relationship with my skin for almost ten years now, and to put it simply, it sucks. I guess the impact it could have on my daughter never occurred to me before because (I imagine) she never really seemed to notice it before. But now she follows me around, including into the bathroom, and has figured out that after I pee, I stand up, pull up my pants, close the toilet lid, flush and then wash my hands. She has learned to anticipate each step and even wants to help me do things like close the toilet lid. So what's to say she hasn't already figured out that Mama spends a considerable amount of time in front of the mirror, pressing on her face with her fingertips, and that when she's done, she's got red marks all over her skin? So maybe it's because Marie has become so much more aware of all the things she observes, because she understands so much more of what's happening around her, because any day now, she might start wondering what exactly her mama is doing in front of the mirror - whatever the reason, I am suddenly aware of the fact that this behavior of mine could have a serious impact on Marie's relationship with her own skin and her own body. And really, I think the fashion and cosmetics industries do plenty to screw up a girl's self-esteem. She doesn't need her mom's baggage on top of it.

So because I want to set a positive example for my daughter, I am making a renewed effort to accept and embrace the skin I have (rather than allowing myself to succumb to the ridiculous delusion that if "I just squeeze out every last drop of this pimple," my skin will be better afterwards or to wallow in self-pity because "I thought you weren't supposed to have zits anymore in your mid-twenties") and treat it with respect and kindness because it's the only skin I'll ever have.

being a parent isn't easy

2008-07-19T00:16:00.001+02:00

Check out these two short pieces on being a mom:

Biker in the Rain

A Giant Pansy

coming up for air

2008-07-11T20:44:00.002+02:00

Hi y'all! Remember me? I often lie in bed at night composing blog entries in my head. I don't get up and write them down because if I did, I would risk waking the baby beside me, and you DON'T WAKE SLEEPING BABIES. Rule One of sleep-deprived parenting, people. Anyway, the point is that I have lots to say but no time in which to say it.
First we were on vacation. Then we were recovering from vacation. Then Marie turned one and got infant roseola (3-day high fever followed by itchy rash. fun stuff). Then we all started grappling with the new challenges posed by our walking bundle of mischief. And then, just as I was starting to adjust to being a stay-at-home mom to a toddler, I decided to up the ante and take on some fairly lucrative editing work. And since it's fairly lucrative, I decided to take on quite a bit of work. At least it's quite a bit for someone who's simultaneously taking care of a spirited 13-month old all day.
But rest assured, gentle reader, I shall return to the blogosphere soon, and when I do, here are some of the things I will be writing about:

- How my baby girl turned into a writhing, screaming, biting, tantrum-throwing toddler, like, OVERNIGHT.
- Why so-called "extended" breastfeeding has saved my ass.
- The time Marie suddenly decided that sippy cups are for losers.
- Why I HEART sugaring.
- My decision to never buy laundry detergent again.
- How Marie stole the hearts of about a dozen sweaty men by dribbling a soccer ball onto the Astroturf. Seriously, she had those dudes wrapped around her little finger.
- Why Berlin rocks when you're a low-income parent.
- How a fistful of lint nearly flooded our bathroom.

Stay tuned!

the conversation we just had

2008-06-24T20:47:00.002+02:00

me: "Do you know what emphysema is? Wait. Let me look up the German word.
...
Okay, "Emphysem." Basically the same word."

Toffi: "Yeah, I think I've heard it before."

me: "It's basically an illness that smokers get a lot. Usually when they're older. Apparently, Amy Winehouse has it already."

Toffi: "You read that kind of news, too?"

me, smiling sheepishly: "Yeah."

Toffi: "Her father said it, didn't he?"

me: "Yeah."

Toffi: "Oh god, I can't believe we're having this conversation. I'm going to go make dinner."

soooo tired

2008-06-04T21:52:00.005+02:00

So we're back. We spent a lovely week in The Hague, visiting my cousin, and then we attended a wedding in Hamburg. I would write more and tell y'all about it, but we're all pretty tired over here. Marie got a tooth, started walking, turned one and got her first, real fever all in only 3 days time. So I'll be back and writing as soon as we've rested up a bit.

please don't squeeze the Charmin!

2008-05-19T21:10:00.004+02:00

German toilet paper sucks. I mean, it's just terrible. No matter how cheap or expensive, 2-, 3- or 4-ply, it's inevitably too rough and not absorbent enough. In the U.S., I've found plenty of brands that have satisfied my needs. By no means am I someone who needs the most expensive, fluffy, 12-ply, wipes-your-ass-for-you, next-generation toilet paper. But come on, a little softness wouldn't be out of line. And also? When the paper isn't really absorbent, you gotta wipe and repeat. And if the paper in question is rough as well, that isn't really fun, yanno?

Well, after Marie was born, Toffi bought some Charmin for me since he figured I'd be extra-sensitive in those parts. It was a fantastic idea, and we continued to buy it after that most of the time. Now I've taken it to the next level by announcing to him, quite matter-of-factly, that I do not intend to ever buy any brand of toilet paper other than Charmin so long as we live in Germany. I don't care if it's expensive, environmentally unfriendly or even that it's made by Procter and Gamble. Hell, I wouldn't care if Satan himself made those rolls. I simply refuse to pay too much money to wipe my ass with what amounts to cleverly packaged sandpaper ever again. And now it seems as though Marie has followed my example.

Seriously, Marie should do commercials for Charmin, 'cuz whenever we buy it, she loves to play with the package. Usually it just involves holding it on her lap and tugging at the handy plastic strap. But today, she tried something new. Holding the package by the strap, she let it hang out of the stroller, just barely dragging on the ground. She did this all the way home, happy as a clam. Y'all shoulda seen the looks we got. This girl's a crowd pleaser.

mark your calendars

2008-05-16T21:39:00.004+02:00

Marie said her first word today! I mean, apart from "Mama" and a word I suspect is her current rendition of "Papa!"

What's the word, you ask?

Well, you non-German speakers will be slightly confused when I say it was "zart."

Zart is pronounced "tsart" and means, depending on the context, either gentle or delicate.

Perhaps this seems like a strange first word, but it's not that surprising, actually. You see, whenever we give Oko a treat that he's allowed to take from our hands, we tell him he has to take it "very gently," or "ganz zart," so he doesn't snatch it from us. In turn, we have taught Marie to give Oko little treats as well. She thinks it's great comedy when she successfully gives him a morsel of whatever she's supposed to be eating. And when this happens, we tell Oko repeatedly, "ganz zart," since we definitely don't want him to get the idea that he can snatch anything from Marie. Likewise, when Marie wants to pet Oko, we tell her, "ganz zart," so that she doesn't grab him by the fur and twist and pull (which is something I doubt Oko would tolerate for long). So all told, "zart" is a word Marie hears quite a lot.

Toffi informed me that she had said it several times this morning after he said it while supervising a Marie-Oko interaction. Then, she spent the rest of the day saying it.

Now I'm just wondering when the first English word will come.

Oh, and more on the unmitigated f***tard who pissed me off yesterday coming soon.

question

2008-05-15T21:10:00.003+02:00

Ok guys, give it to me straight. I can take it. Do I have a big neon sign above my head, visible to all but myself, that lights up with the words, "Go ahead. Pick on me. Bitch at me. Butt into my life and tell me exactly what you think I'm doing wrong. It won't take much to get under my skin?" 'Cuz if I do, that would explain a lot. And if I don't, what the hell is it about me that attracts all the idiots having bad days that want to let it out on a perfect stranger?

Happy Mother's Day!

2008-05-11T22:54:00.003+02:00

It's a little late, but I didn't want to let the day go by without wishing all the moms in my life (and that includes those of you whom I don't know personally) a wonderful, wonderful day. Mine was lovely, complete with roses and sleeping in and Skyping with my parents so they could see Marie's latest trick: waving hello and goodbye.

strange things afoot in the park

2008-05-09T23:49:00.006+02:00

Since the weather here has been thoroughly non-German lately and thus, summery, we've spent some time at the park over the past couple days. The Volkspark Friedrichshain is always full of characters, but sometimes things just get weird.

Two days ago, we came across this sight:
Really, I just don't know what to say about that.

And then today, as we were leaving the park, we walked past a bus stop and suddenly heard a loud *THUD!* followed quickly by a *YELP!*

Now, Germans can be kind of overachieving when it comes to neatness and cleanliness. Toffi and I have actually seen normal(-looking) citizens drive around with cleaning products and paper towels to clean the public post boxes. And while we were pretty taken aback by the sight, we weren't totally surprised. It isn't really hard to imagine a middle-aged German couple griping about how dingy mailboxes have become and how upright citizens wouldn't have stood for it 20 years ago. So it really only takes one more step (and some serious OCD) to get to the point where these people decide to take matters into their own hands and finally set things right. Righteous indignation is a powerful motivator, apparently.

Aaaaanyway, so German public property tends to be kept quite orderly and clean. Including bus stops. And in this case, it turns out the glass panes of the bus shelter were so damn clean, Oko didn't see the glass and ran right smack into it. Hence, the *THUD!* of his head ramming the glass and his *YELP!* of pain and surprise. I felt horrible for him. I'm sure trotting head-first into a solid pane of glass is pretty painful. Plus, Oko obviously didn't know what hit him. But it was also so damn funny that I couldn't contain my laughter. Neither could Toffi, nor the girl waiting at the bus stop, who was probably wondering whether our dog was stupid, senile or just a pot-head.

on a lighter note...

2008-05-05T21:03:00.005+02:00

Okay, so now that I've FINALLY gotten Marie to sleep and before she's awake AGAIN, I'm going to tell you about something hilarious that happened today.

Actually, it started last night, when I couldn't find the reading light that I had been using for the past few evenings (I stole it from Toffi). I searched the bedroom superficially, but quickly gave up because I just wanted to sleep and Marie was already crying anyway. Some time this afternoon, I remembered it was missing and started looking again. It was a frustrating enterprise, as Marie and Toffi were playing on the bed at the time, and Toffi was trying to help me look by looking in places I had already searched. I've been tense and over-wrought recently and have had a tendency to pick fights over nothing, and this afternoon was no exception. Things were escalating to argument level when we called a truce and gave up the hunt. "It's probably in Marie's special drawer, anyway," Toffi said.

We have this little cart in our kitchen that has mesh wire drawers and rolls in under the counter top. Marie loves to stand in front of the cart and fiddle with the wire mesh and stick toys through the little holes. A few weeks ago, I found one of her little drumsticks (she takes it with her all over the apartment) in the drawer next to the dish towels. And it's happened once or twice since then. We've also found her carrot rattle in there before. It was conceivable that Marie had been playing in the bedroom and taken the reading light with her on her further explorations. So I went into the kitchen and looked. Sure enough, there it was:

The reading light is the little black rectangle on the left side of the second drawer. It sort of looks like a cell phone. I burst out laughing when I saw this and called Toffi into the kitchen to show him. The argument was forgotten, and now we know: next time something is missing, check Marie's special drawer.

barely alive

2008-05-05T10:50:00.002+02:00

Right now I feel like belting Pearl Jam's "Alive" at the top of my lungs, but I'm simply too tired. We're still in hell over here, so stay tuned for more details on our agonies.

Be assured, we are okay. We are alive; we are not seriously ill; the sky isn't falling on top of us. Toffi and I are just tired and frustrated that we have been robbed of our baby-free* evenings for the past several days.

* To be fair, our evenings haven't been baby-free for eleven months, but I'm using the term loosely to include having at least 2 hours to ourselves in which we can slouch on the sofa and watch mind-numbing television together.

job qualifications

2008-05-02T13:36:00.004+02:00

Being a parent is not easy. Anyone who says it is, is lying. There are some days, however, when it is so hard it makes you wonder if you're cut out for it.

These past two nights have been HELL, people. Marie has a cold, complete with a runny/stuffy nose and a low-grade fever (She caught it from Toffi, and it remains to be seen whether I get it too or not.). She also has a diaper rash. She is on the verge of learning to walk, and her body seems to need to practice it at all hours, even when she is asleep (Yesterday, she actually stood on her own for over a minute several times!). And she's teething, BIG TIME. I'm serious. I have bite marks on my knuckles from over 48 hours ago, and her shirt is constantly soaking wet from the leaky faucet that is her mouth. Put this all together, and you have the perfect storm.

Marie was in bed last night at 7:30, a reasonable time. It didn't even take that long for her to fall asleep. But then she was up at 8:15, 8:45, 9:15. After going in to her the third time, I said screw this, and had Toffi turn out all the lights in the living room and turn down the volume on the TV so that we could just barely hear it. I rocked her, bounced her, and finally nursed her to sleep. When she was deeply asleep, I settled down into an arm chair and ate some chocolate with her on my lap. Everything seemed fine until Toffi accidentally brushed a button on his laptop, suddenly turning the volume waaaaay up. Marie was up, screaming, inconsolable. And it took over an hour to get her settled again. Even then, it was only a light, fussing sleep. We all went to bed, and she finally settled down into a deep sleep around 1sh. At 4:15 it was over, and I spent the rest of the night switching her back and forth between breasts. She was half asleep most of the time, but any attempt on my part to free my nipple from her grasp so that I could get some rest, too, was futile. Toffi got up with her at 7:30, leaving me to sleep for a couple hours.

And if you think that sounds rough, you'll hardly be able to believe that it was actually better than the night before. Because that night, I didn't get any sleep at all. This is really one of those times when I wonder whether I have what it takes to provide for another human being. Deep down, I know I do, but sleep deprivation and a hurting baby don't exactly boost my confidence.

family likeness

2008-04-28T14:00:00.000+02:00

Am I imagining things, or did Marie get this look from me?

OPP - other people's parenting

2008-04-26T20:14:00.002+02:00

I was recently talking to a mom-friend of mine about the danger of criticizing other parents when you've only seen a snapshot of their child(ren) and parenting. For example, when you see a 4-year-old with a pacifier, your gut reaction might be something like, "Jeez, what's wrong with his parents? Are they just too lazy to respond to his needs so they stick a binky in him? Don't they care about his dental health?" At least that's what my reaction would be. But it wouldn't be fair because I know nothing about this boy or his parents, and I have no way of judging whether or not he needs a pacifier. Those parents might have some very good reason for letting him have one.

But you have to draw the line somewhere.

Toffi and I were taking a walk in the park with Marie and Oko today. The weather was beautiful, and we were enjoying it so much that we probably stayed out longer than we should have. Marie was tired, probably hungry, but not anywhere close to accepting the fact that she should perhaps take a nap. But for the time being, it wasn't critical. We were still hopeful that she would fall asleep if we pushed the stroller over enough cobblestones. Just as I dared to hope that she really was about to drift off, I noticed a little girl who had fallen off her bike and was crying miserably for her mother. She couldn't have been older than 4. I looked around for the mother, but didn't see anyone who seemed to "belong" to her. I expected to find one of two things: either a mom running over to rescue her little girl, or one standing a few feet off trying to act calm to thwart a tantrum and/or total despair on the part of the girl. I saw neither. All I saw was a woman in a red jacket who was looking at the girl with an expression of mild interest. More of a curious onlooker than a mother, really.

I was just about to go over to the girl myself when a woman with a bike approached her and knelt down beside her. "Ah, that's her mom," I thought. But somehow the interaction didn't look like a mother-daughter one. And the girl was pointing at the woman with the red jacket. Could that person really be her mom? Could a mom really do that? Stand 50 feet away and watch her daughter sob and cry out for "Mama" and then watch a complete stranger help the girl up? I didn't have time to think about it too much, though, because Marie was becoming very unhappy about our attempt to get her to sleep, and her fussing was quickly escalating to full-on crying. Toffi and I helped her sit up in the stroller so she could more easily look around, and this seemed to placate her for the time being. I looked back at the girl-bike scene to see what had happened. It was now clear that the woman in the red jacket was, indeed, the mother, and she still had that nonchalant look on her face. The other woman had helped the girl over to her mom. The girl didn't look badly hurt, but she was still crying. Not a tantrumy cry, but a genuinely distraught one. I was livid.

But our situation with Marie was quickly spiraling out of control. She was positively screaming at this point, and we were beginning to realize that the cobblestones wouldn't do their magic this time. She was too tired, maybe too hungry, and probably just too overstimulated from having been outside for several hours. We gave up just as she was about to start hyperventilating (less than 5 minutes after the initial crying began), and I held her close for about 15 minutes while she calmed down. Then, instead of getting something to eat, we headed straight home, and I carried her most of the way. I wasn't happy about the abrupt change of plan, but I also knew that trying to get Marie to go along with our plans would have been an exercise in futility.

Now I know that what I saw at the park was only a snapshot of this girl's life and her mother's parenting. And I'm not trying to compare my parenting to this mom's parenting. But this wasn't a 4-year-old with a pacifier; this was a 4-year-old who was scared, alone and crying for her mom, and her mom stood far away from her and just flat-out ignored her child. And so I am comparing our reaction to Marie's distress to this mother's reaction to her daughter's distress - just these two snapshots. I'm inclined to think that if this mother had been in our situation, she would have stuck to her plan and let her daughter suffer through it. I can't get over the totally serene look on her face as she watched her daughter's agony. And seeing this has made me determined to never be that woman. As a mother, I have made mistakes and will certainly make more in the future, but I hope that I will never so dramatically neglect Marie's needs. She deserves more, and so does the girl who fell off her bike.

I will now get back down off my soapbox and share this:

Last night, I went out (at night) for the FIRST TIME since Marie was born. It was Naf and Marek's birthday party, and so I went to a bar and drank two whole beers! Granted, I was home before midnight and cuddled up with Marie shortly thereafter. But holy crap, did it ever feel like freedom. I hadn't really missed going out to bars, but last night was just plain fun.

cheerios champion!

2008-04-24T11:02:00.002+02:00

And the winner is ...

... my mom! At least she's the first one to get the coveted O's over here. I know there are one or two other contest entries on the way - and all will be receiving their prizes. Thank you!!

Marie's first encounter with the Cheerios was a smashing success if I've ever seen one. She immediately liked them, gobbled them up, and only 2 O's landed on the floor (and thus, in Oko's tummy) in the process!

Sadly, however, we think Marie may have a corn allergy or intolerance. She doesn't seem to have a problem with corn products (like cornstarch or corn oil), but anytime we give her baby food that has actual corn in it, she gets a minor case of hives. The fact that other corn products don't garner a reaction makes me think it's probably not an actual allergy, but rather some kind of intolerance. Any thoughts? Anybody know about this stuff? 'Cuz I'm pretty clueless when it comes to allergies.

Welcome to the Carnival of Breastfeeding!

2008-04-21T12:56:00.010+02:00

Today, I'm participating in the Carnival of Breastfeeding, in which various bloggers are sharing their experiences with breastfeeding challenges and how they overcame them. My piece is on plugged milk ducts and blebs, which my faithful readers may remember me mentioning in my post on contortionist nursing. I hope you enjoy reading it, and don't forget to check out the links to the other Carnival of Breastfeeding posts (see below), which I'll be updating throughout the day.

My husband and I live in Germany, and it is common practice here for a midwife to deliver the baby – even in hospitals – and to pay house visits for the first few weeks postpartum. As per my midwife’s instructions, my husband had made sure to buy a head of cabbage before our daughter was born. He washed the leaves and stacked them in our freezer. This, Frederike assured us, would come in handy when engorgement inevitably followed my milk coming in, and although the thought of icing my breasts with cabbage leaves seemed pretty strange to me, we decided to follow her advice. But I never experienced engorgement, and eventually, we thawed the cabbage and used it in a casserole. My baby and I were nursing champs, or so I thought.

The German word for a plugged duct is “Milchstau,” and it literally means “backed-up milk.” I think it really captures the way plugged ducts feel. You can’t really feel the plugged duct; what you feel is the immense and ever-growing pressure behind the blockage as your milk collects and your breast swells. When our daughter was about eight or nine weeks old, I woke up on a rainy Friday morning and noticed that my left breast felt really heavy. I figured it was just fuller than the other one, and so we nursed on that side. But afterwards, it felt worse instead of better, which didn’t make any sense to me. By midday I was sure that something was wrong, and I spent every spare minute searching the Internet for answers.

After reading this description on kellymom, I was certain that I had plugged ducts. I followed the suggestions listed on the site and used heat before nursing, nursed frequently on the left side, and cooled the area after nursing. None of it helped. By the time my husband came home from work that day, I was a wreck. I was in tremendous pain, but worse still, I was completely frustrated by my inability to solve the problem. We were the breastfeeding pros! What had happened? Why had I thrown away that cabbage?!

That evening, as Marie slept on my lap, I searched the Internet high and low for other solutions. The information on plugged ducts was more or less the same everywhere, so I started searching parenting forums for threads on the subject. The forums at babycenter finally offered some new insights. In a thread on plugged ducts (which is no longer on the site now that they’ve changed their design), various mothers kept mentioning the “white dot,” something that was like a pimple and could be popped. I looked at my breast but couldn’t see any white dot, so I scrolled through the entire thread, searching hundreds of posts for a more detailed description of the famous dot.

The “white dot,” it turned out, was a bleb – a blocked nipple pore. By pressing on the painful part of the breast, the bleb would bulge out, making it more easily seen on the nipple. I tried it, and suddenly I saw what looked like a tiny whitehead on my nipple. After having found their white dots, many of the women on the forum had simply popped them like a pimple. So, after washing my hands thoroughly, I gave it a whirl. I squeezed out a white plug of milk, no bigger than a grain of sand, and as soon as I pressed on the painful part of my breast, a thin line of milk shot out in an arc. Relief!

Despite my success, however, I faced further discouragement. I started getting plugged ducts frequently – at least once a week – and there wasn’t always a bleb. In these cases, it often took more than 48 hours to resolve the clog, and those two days were always miserable. Also, I quickly learned that “popping” the blebs wasn’t such a great idea, as it took a while for the skin to heal. Still, when there was a bleb, it was much easier to clear the blockage, and the tips at the kellymom and Medela websites were very helpful. In particular, using a sterilized needle to “lift” the bleb off as described on kellymom worked really well, and the skin hardly needed any time to heal afterwards.

At some point, it seemed ridiculous how frequently I was getting plugged ducts and blebs, and I started to look for information on recurrent clogs. Several sources, including kellymom, advised taking a Lecithin supplement. I looked into it, but the cost seemed prohibitive, at least in Germany, where supplements are often sold only by pharmacies and thus include quite a mark-up. I also called my midwife for advice. She asked me if I had been under a lot of stress lately. I didn’t think I had been. The only trend I had noticed was that it always seemed to be raining when I had them. I joked that my left boob always knew when rain was coming. Based on what I told her over the phone, Frederike said she thought I was treating them correctly, and as long as they were resolving within about 48 hours and I wasn’t running a fever, they weren’t anything to worry about, no matter how annoying they were. She suggested I try positioning Marie so that her chin was pointing toward the painful area and that I keep my chin up and try not to get too discouraged.

I was discouraged, though, and I couldn’t imagine doing this over and over again for months on end. I tried Frederike’s suggestion of having Marie’s chin pointed toward the clog, and since this meant somehow getting her chin to point up toward my shoulder, I needed to get creative. With a nursing pillow and my husband’s help, I managed to practice what I call “contortionist nursing,” and it did seem like it took fewer nursing sessions for the clogs to clear up this way. And I realized that there was a common factor besides the rain: almost every time I had a plugged duct, it was the weekend.

When I first noticed this, I considered myself lucky. With my husband home, I had more time to take a bath, apply heat to my breast and try to open up blebs. And he was there to help with our contortionist nursing. But it was a little strange that I almost always woke up on Friday morning with plugged ducts. It reminded me of times when I only got migraines at the end of the week, just in time for the weekend. It also reminded me of getting the flu on the second day of winter break during college – and then again right at the beginning of summer vacation. Maybe I was experiencing the same phenomenon. Maybe I really was under stress but wasn’t allowing myself to feel it. Instead, I was concentrating so hard on making it through the week that I didn’t realize I was saving up all my stress and frustration for the weekend, when my husband was home. I talked to my husband about my new theory, and it seemed plausible to him.

Shortly before I had my first plugged duct, my husband had started a very demanding project. He had to work very late, and even if he did get home early enough for us to eat dinner together, he often spent the evening working on his laptop. He couldn’t do anything about his working hours until the project was over, but after I shared my theory about stress and the plugged ducts with him, he started to make some small changes. We began eating breakfast together every morning before he left. Rather than continue working after he got home, he made an effort to spend more time with our daughter and me. And he made sure that there was always some cash in a drawer so that when he couldn’t make it in time for dinner, I could order takeout food and save myself the trouble of cooking after a long day. I didn’t magically stop getting plugged ducts, but they became less frequent, and that gave me hope.

When my husband’s big project was done, he went back to working normal hours and could be with us much more. The plugged ducts became a rare occurrence, once a month, perhaps. Now our daughter is ten months old, my husband is on paternity leave, and I’m working from home. The flexibility we have in structuring our day has made my daily life far more manageable, and I haven’t had a bleb or plugged duct in over two months. I am a little worried about what will happen when he goes back to work in a month and a half, when Marie will be a year old, but I’m pretty sure that if we do our best to keep in mind what we learned a few months ago, it’ll be OK. Making time for each other made all the difference.

The Carnival of Breastfeeding: “Thrush and mastitis and blebs, oh my!”

• Mama's Magic
• Half Pint Pixie
• Mom on the Go
• Nurturing Notes
• Breastfeeding Mums
• The Motherwear Breastfeeding Blog
• Blessed Nest Perch
• Hobo Mama
• Breastfeeding 1-2-3

the marie lena cheerios challenge

2008-04-08T19:56:00.005+02:00

So y'all, I got a little private* contest: whoever can figure out how to send me a box of Cheerios in such a way that they don't arrive pulverized wins! Multiple winners possible! The winner(s) will receive a gift from Amazon.com that's worth roughly what they spent on the Cheerios and shipping.

Why, you ask?

Well, Marie looooooves to be able to feed herself things. Little crusts of bread seem to work pretty well, as do spiral-shaped noodles, but o-shaped cereals seem to be the biggest hit.

So what's the problem, you ask?

Well, you can't buy Cheerios in Germany (they have no idea what they're missing!), and the only German alternative is natural product sweetened with honey, which is a no-no for babies under 12 months.

So, Toffi and I would be ever so grateful for any Cheerios care packages to East Berlin (am having visions of the Berlin air lift of 1948). Let the contest begin!

* This contest is only open to people I know personally!!!

mischevious munchkin

2008-03-29T22:14:00.007+01:00

So I realized a few days ago that it's been quite a while since I last wrote a real post. Truth is, I've been feeling a little blue lately. Not depressed blue - more like a spring-is-kicking-my-ass blue. Seriously, it happens every year. The weather gets all out of whack. One day it's warm and sunny; the next day it's snowing. The light changes. It seems to rain without warning. And I guess I'm what the Germans call "wetterfühlig," which means sensitive to the weather. My body goes on strike, and I get sluggish and moody or wired and unable to sleep. For some reason, this particular change of season always throws me for a loop, and it only seems to have gotten worse since I moved to Germany, where the weather is significantly more changeable than where I grew up. Seriously, in northern California, the weather - whether good or bad - tends to stick around for at least a week before really changing. In Berlin, on the other hand, I can never really be sure how to dress for the day, and this year has been no exception. The barometer and thermometer have been all over the place these past weeks, and they've dragged my body with them on their little roller-coaster ride. Anyway, so if I've been unreliable lately - if I haven't returned your call or email, if I forgot your birthday or said I'd call you soon and didn't - if I've been non-communicative in any way, I apologize. Now you know why. It's the weather's fault!

OK. Just kidding. It's my fault, but the weather hasn't been helping, is all I'm sayin'. Yanno?

Anyway, Marie is a little ball of fire. For the most part, her sleeping habits have gotten sooooo much better. She's been going to bed at a regular time for several weeks now, and although she's still far from "sleeping through the night," her stretches of uninterrupted sleep have been getting longer again. That being said, as soon as Toffi and I started feeling cocky about our new-found sleep bliss and dared to dream about tweaking her routine to finally get her to drop her third nap (which is really problematic in ways I won't bore you with now), it came back almost immediately to slap us in the face.

Yesterday, Marie took all of 2 naps, each of which was slightly less than 45 minutes. Just for comparison, she usually gets 3, and one of them is usually well over an hour. She was understandably cranky by the end of the day, so I shortened the whole bedtime routine and got her to sleep by shortly after 6pm, which is pretty early for her. I knew something wasn't quite right when I had to go in to her twice within the first two hours, but I was totally unprepared for what happened around 10 pm, when I went in at the sound of her voice for the third time. She was sitting up in bed, waving her arms, smiling and ready to play!

Granted, the fun only lasted about an hour because she clearly hadn't slept even close to enough and had no business being up at that time. But there was no way I was going to get her back to sleep, so I let her get up and play with us. By 11:30, she had turned into a little sleep-deprived monster. She wanted nothing more than to play, but since she was exhausted, she kept crying out in protest. Exactly what she was protesting, I know not, but I suspect she was just complaining that she felt like crap and didn't know why. The problem was that since her internal clock was all out of whack, I couldn't get her to relax either. We tried darkening the living room as I rocked her in my lap. She wasn't having it. Nursing was pointless too, since she kept nipping me. I took her back to bed, but even then, it took what felt like forever to get her to fall asleep again.

You'd think that after that circus of an evening, she would have conked out and slept most of the rest of the night without stirring. HA! As parents of babies inevitably learn, babies don't sleep well if they're sleep-deprived. So that means if they don't get their nap quota, their sleep that night will suck. Which means that their naps the next day won't be as restful either. And so the vicious cycle continues. The trick to breaking it? Search me, but eventually, something gives, and if the parents are persistent (in other words, have become zombies whose sole purpose is to get a small bundle of pure, vibrating energy to sleep at regular intervals), baby somehow gets back to normality. Whatever that is.

I digress. So Marie was up every friggin' hour last night, and by 6:30 this morning, there was no persuading her to stay in bed, so Toffi, knowing that I had slept even less than he had, got up with her. She took one super short nap around 9ish and then again at 1 pm in her stroller. The good news, though, is that she went to sleep at 7 this evening, slept for 3 hours, and went back to sleep without much fuss. Let's just hope last night was a fluke!

I will now stop rambling and leave you with two very short clips. The first is of Marie standing up and laughing mischievously with pride. It's an excellent example of this proud little chuckle of hers. Clearly, she's ready to conquer the world. The second one is of her playing with her carrot rattle, which she seems to call "ne-ne." Make sure the volume is on and enjoy!

yes, it's gotten better

2008-03-20T20:55:00.003+01:00

I realized today that I haven't posted in a week and that my last post was after an extremely stressful night. Well, I don't want to jinx myself by saying this, but things got better 2 days later. Marie's back to something resembling a sleep schedule, and it involves actually sleeping several hours in a row. In fact, one day this week when Marie had been napping, Toffi and I heard some noises through the baby monitor. We assumed she had woken up and that the sound of her fussing would soon turn into crying, which is still the way she says, "Get your asses in here! You know damn well I don't wanna be alone!"

The crying never came.

We figured she must have gone back to sleep - or that maybe she hadn't really been awake to begin with.

Then we heard a high-pitched but totally happy-sounding, "Na, na, na!"

We went to the bedroom and opened the door. Marie was standing on our bed, playing with the cord to my reading lamp, which I had "hidden" behind the headboard. She turned her head to look at us and smiled, like, "Hey dudes, what's up?"

I guess we need to find a new place for my reading lamp.

exhausted

2008-03-13T12:02:00.002+01:00

Marie, she is killing us. I suspect a growth spurt or something similar, 'cause this is ridiculous. She suddenly started eating MUCH larger portions at lunch and dinner time, but this hasn't led to a further reduction in how much she nurses. On the contrary, we nursed more often yesterday than we have in weeks. And last evening, a mere hour after I had put her to bed, Marie was up and at 'em, ready to play again. We gave up on getting her back to bed and let her explore the living room while we ate dinner and watched some TV. Then we all went to bed around 11ish, but I was up every damn hour to nurse her. At 6:40 this morning I just couldn't take it anymore and begged Toffi to get up with our little monster so that just once I could get more than 45 minutes sleep at a stretch. Marie needed to nurse again at 9, and then at 10, and at 11:30 she ate a lunch twice as large as what she was eating only 2 days ago. Toffi and I are like zombies today. So before I fall asleep at the keyboard, I'm going to make us some more coffee ...

cruisin' for a bruisin'

2008-03-04T20:09:00.002+01:00

Marie is a cruiser. She spends all day pulling up on anything within reach and then cruising from one piece of furniture to another. Her crawl is adorable and kinda funny. Instead of crawling on hands and knees, she crawls on hands, one knee and one foot. It might sound lopsided and awkward, but she's fast! Basically, no matter where we set her down, we can be pretty sure she'll be somewhere completely different in less than a minute. One game we play is to set her down by the safety gate in our living room. Before we know it, she's pulled up on the couch:Then she sidles on down the couch to the glass table, from which she cruises on to the other couch and eventually to its end table, at which point we grab her and take her over to the safety gate, set her down, and watch the whole thing from the beginning.

Of course, she takes several spills a day. Some of them end in tears, wailing, and some scrapes and bruises, but most of the time she just takes it in stride. She's a tough cookie.

Being an Amazon woman is pretty hard work, though, so she still takes 3 naps a day...

2008-02-26T18:04:00.002+01:00

We were away this weekend visiting family - mine and Toffi's. The big event was Toffi's grandma's 85th birthday. Marie was dressed in her blues for her great-grandma's big day!

everything hits at once*

2008-02-15T22:29:00.002+01:00

So instead of reaching her milestones one at a time, Marie has decided to lump them together. In a 24-hour period that spanned Monday and Tuesday, Marie sat up (as in went from lying down to sitting all by herself), crawled and pulled up (from sitting to standing) for the first time. I remember reading that babies generally can't crawl until they can sit up by themselves and that they then spend some time figuring out the mechanics of crawling once they've got the right muscles. Well, Marie thumbs her nose at those "experts," apparently. For the moment, she's more interested in pulling up and standing than she is in crawling, but we've been getting down on the floor with her to encourage her to "crawl to Mama." When she makes it to where I am, she reaches out her little hand to touch mine and looks up at me and smiles. It totally melts my heart, and for a magical moment, it makes it okay that she kept me up all last night with her unusually fitful sleep.

* a nifty song by Spoon

tooth the fourth

2008-02-10T21:52:00.000+01:00

The Dreyzahn days are over. Marie now has four razor-sharp incisors. She also has a reeeeeally loud voice, and she's been practicing her babbling at incredible volumes. I have a pretty bad cold, so I'm a little too delirious to write. Instead, I've got new photos:

Everybody has bed head!

Our Pumpkin eating pumpkin ...

Mountain-climbing Marie!

Here's the great orator, reciting a masterpiece... something about a pig named Max who lives on a farm and eats a lot ...

Pulling up on Papa...

... and then on the couch!

Oooooo, camera. Lemme see!

Okay, that's it. I'm going to bed now.

Dreyzahn

2008-02-04T10:30:00.000+01:00

When I was sixteen, my mom won an SPCA raffle and brought home a new dog. He was a lovable Chesapeake Bay Retriever mix, and it took us a number of weeks to finally settle on a name worthy of him. In the end, we decided to call him Dreyfuss after the dog in the sitcom Empty Nest. Dreyfuss is actually an antiquated German spelling for "three-foot," and indeed, one of our neighbors who was married to a Bavarian woman used to call our dog "Three Leg." Well, Dreyfuss tragically passed away from an autoimmune disease a few years ago, but his memory lives on in our new (and temporary - don't worry!) nickname for Marie: Dreyzahn. After a hellish few days of crying and not sleeping and chomping down on everything she could get a hold of, she finally cut her third tooth sometime last night. Henceforth, she shall be known as "Three Tooth."

P.S. Still no real crawling going on, but Marie has figured out how to propel herself forward (and sideways, and backwards), so nothing is safe from her curious little hands anymore, and the fact that she can actually move deliberately has lessened her frustration considerably.

all i want for christmas is my two front teeth...

2008-01-29T20:20:00.001+01:00

In the tradition of the Mott women, Marie has an affinity for carrots. Not only does she like the mushy, baby food kind, but she has also taken an interest in crunchy raw ones.

Unfortunately, she doesn't quite have enough teeth to do much with them. She gnaws, but without much in the way of results.

"Hey, get back here, carrot!"

Alas, Oko is also a big carrot fan. For now, he gets to munch on them. Marie's gonna have to wait for those upper incisors to come in.

who woulda thunk it?

2008-01-25T23:38:00.000+01:00

So a few nights ago I put Marie to bed (which is a kind of misleading way to phrase it, since she hasn't slept for more than an hour at a time in the evenings in several weeks, meaning every time I've put her down it's been for something more resembling a catnap than a good night's sleep), only to have her wake up crying a short time later. In my Mama-knows-it-all kind of way, I just assumed that it was Toffi's banging stuff in the kitchen that woke her, but when I walked into the bedroom, I saw that she was on her hands and knees, crying her little heart out. Turned out she had rolled over in her sleep to practice crawling, thus waking herself up. Good lord, I wish she would hurry up and figure out how this crawling thing works. Maybe we can all get some decent sleep again.

creepy crawly critter

2008-01-16T19:43:00.000+01:00

Sometimes even the cutest little babies can be monsters. Since we got back to Berlin, Marie has been trying to crawl. I mean she's really been putting her heart into it, like, "Come Hell or high water, people, I am gonna crawl RIGHT NOW!" The only problem is that it hasn't actually happened yet, and after every failed attempt - some of which end with Marie landing on her face and some with her moving backwards - she gets very frustrated. I've been telling myself that her being thiiiiiiiiis close to reaching this developmental milestone has been the culprit behind her rather... ahem... trying behavior. She's been nursing constantly, scratching and clawing at me, sleeping lightly (when she sleeps at all), trying to crawl off her changing table, and, best of all, sometimes spends an hour or more making loud noises in the dark while we are all trying to sleep. This last one is particularly bad because as soon as Toffi and I make attempts to ignore the loud baby in our bed and just fall asleep, her experimental noises turn into real crying, which means any chance I had of sleeping has been delayed even more.

Of course, I have no idea if this behavior is linked to the crawling at all. I'm just guessing, which is pretty much all you can do when you have a baby. Seriously, you get an idea from baby books about what sorts of things they go through at certain times, you get a heads up from other parents about which behaviors might mean what, and you have a certain amount of your own intuition. But when it comes down to it, you've only known this person for a few months, and they can't be all, "Yo Mom, I'm trying to finally get this crawling thing down, so if I seem a little cranky, that's why." So here's hoping that she crawls one day soon and that things calm down after that - at least until she learns the next cute thing.

tooth number two

2008-01-07T14:21:00.000+01:00

Well, Marie now sports two pearly whites. It's funny how they appear so suddenly. One day I'm telling people, "I think she's about to get a tooth," while simultaneously wondering if that's actually true. And the next day I suddenly notice a sharp little edge on her gum. I ask myself whether Marie actually feels the moment the tooth breaks through the gum.

she suffers in style...

Anyway, we're back in Germany. The flight was a little harder than the flight over, mainly because we didn't have a nifty bassinet mounted to the bulkhead wall in front of us, so one of us was holding Marie at all times. She actually slept quite a bit, but neither Toffi nor I slept a wink. We only managed to stay awake until 6 pm that first evening in Marburg, and I still feel like I'm recovering. We'll be heading back to Berlin in a few days, and we've rented a minivan to ensure that we can fit all the stuff we've got with us - the luggage barely fit into Toffi's parents' Benz for the drive home from the airport. Between now and then, we'll be relaxing here in picturesque Marburg, continuing our adventures in feeding Marie solids and having fun playing with our new laptops.

the day that wouldn't end

2007-12-31T06:58:00.000+01:00

The twenty-seventh of December was not our day. We had driven to Mendocino on the day before and were planning on taking a day trip up to the redwoods along the Avenue of the Giants. The day started out fine. We woke up in our little rented room and discovered that Marie had cut her first tooth overnight, but we had yet to realize that there were hours of tooth-related crankiness still ahead. We got ready, headed into town and had a nice breakfast (albeit with pretty terrible coffee), and after a brief stop at the ocean's edge, we were on our way up Highway 1.

But a mile or two north of Fort Bragg, traffic came to a standstill. There was an accident ahead, and it had blocked the road in both directions. It seemed the only thing to do was to turn around and take a different route, and that's exactly what we did. Our different route turned out to be an incredibly long detour, however, and it was hours before we got we were anywhere near our destination. Along the way, nothing seemed to go in our favor; traffic was bad, the road was hard and mountainous, the weather left much to be desired, and at some point, Marie had such an explosive bowel movement that she managed to soil nearly every article of clothing she was wearing. Of course, her mama had forgotten to bring a spare set of clothes.

We finally got to the Avenue of the Giants and reached the visitor center. By this time, it was 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon, and with all the tall trees and whatnot, it was pretty well near dark. We headed for Founder's Grove to take a look at some of the biggest redwoods in the world and got ready to take a little walk through the trees in driving rain.

As we started the trail loop through the grove, it was clear that Marie was not enjoying herself (to be honest, I wasn't enjoying myself that much either, but I was determined to make the most of it at this point). She was fussing a lot and crying any time Toffi stood still (he was carrying her in the Ergo Baby). Taking pictures and filming wasn't easy in the extremely low light, and the rain made it even harder, but I did the best I could. The trees were absolutely mind-blowing, and as always, I was in awe of them, but it still wasn't exactly the experience for which we had been hoping. After twenty minutes, we were back in the car and Marie was not happy. Fortunately, we were able to get back on the highway right away and head back to Mendocino. I was looking forward to picking up some takeout food and beer and enjoying it in our cozy room with the ocean view.

Little did I realize that the adventure had just begun. The drive was really tough in the dark and the rain. I had to concentrate more than I think I ever have while behind the wheel. At one point, I got in behind a CalTrans snow plow and followed it as a kind of orientation. This helped a lot, but it turned out to be more than just a convenient driving aid because only a few miles after turning off onto Highway 1, the rain turned to snow. About a quarter mile after that, we started sliding.

Now it's one thing to slide around in the snow. It's another thing to slide around on a narrow, winding, 2-lane mountain road with a deadly drop-off at the non-existent shoulder. Fortunately, there were two pickups stopped at the point where this happened, and the people belonging to these vehicles turned out to be very kind and helpful. I had decided that I was no longer capable of driving. The situation had made me nervous and shaky. Also, Toffi has a lot more experience driving in wintry conditions. I got out of the car, took Marie out, and Toffi now had to turn the car around in the snow. The pickup drivers helped push the car and acted as extra eyes for Toffi to make the turn. I was paralyzed by fear as I watched him maneuver the car so close to the edge - I had horror visions of him going off the road after having taken on the risk and responsibility of getting the two of us to safety. But he got the car turned around just fine, and it was time for me and Marie to get back in.

I thought that all this meant we would have to spend hours going the long way around. In other words, it would be a long, stressful drive back. It turned out to be much worse. By the time we had retraced our steps back town Highway 1 to the junction with 101, the snow had reached lower elevations, and 101 was subject to the same conditions we had just encountered on 1. I was pretty much gripped with terror in the back seat, unable to console Marie, who was crying inconsolably. I'm not sure whether it was her tooth, the dark, whether she was hungry or sick of being in her car seat, or whether my anxiety was rubbing off. In any event, she was certainly not happy about the situation. Needless to say, I wasn't happy either. I was hungry, tired and had a headache, and I was pretty much sure we were all going to die. The road was so bad, it was snowing so hard, and the road was so windy and steep. Not only that, but we kept seeing vehicles on the side of the road, obviously stuck. At one point, we say two big rig trucks that had spun out in a curve. Toffi did a fantastic job driving, though, and he got us to Laytonville safely, where we pulled into a Chevron station so I could finally nurse Marie and then go inside to hear anything I could about road conditions south of town.

From everything we heard, it didn't get better further down - it got worse. Locals were talking about the worst storm and road conditions in 30 years, and CalTrans had closed Highway 101 from Willits to Ukiah. In other words, without chains (which I had, in my infinite wisdom, left in Sacramento), we weren't gonna leave Laytonville that evening. So the next thing to do was to find a place to stay, but all the hotels - all 3 of them - were full. We went to all of them anyway and asked if they could help us out, but all to no avail. My freaking out continued. Toffi and I could have slept in the car, but what about Marie? We couldn't do that to her. I was having new visions - ones of us stuck in this tiny redneck town for a week, snowed in so bad that we'd miss our flight back to Germany. Toffi didn't have any contact solution with him, I didn't have my medication with me, and we had no fresh clothes for Marie, so we'd be blind, dirty and going through massive medication withdrawal for days. So in my desperation, I walked up to the cashier at the gas station and said, "I feel a little weird asking this, but do you know anyone in town who'd be willing to put up two strangers with a baby?"

My boldness was rewarded. He told me where the local pastor lived and said he was sure he'd help us out somehow. When I knocked on the pastor's door and asked him to help us out, I didn't even have to fake cry - I was so shaken from the evening's adventures that I had been fighting back tears for hours. So we spent the night in a spare room at the Laytonville pastor's house. He found us some pillows and blankets, and I was even able to call my parents and tell them we were ok. I don't think I've ever been so grateful for the Church's existence. Things were definitely looking up. We McGuyvered a contact lens case using two Ziploc baggies marked "L" and "R" and some Visine, made sandwiches with some rubbery bread from the gas station, and watched a couple ancient B-westerns with John Wayne. We couldn't make my medication magically appear, but it wasn't horrible. Toffi took over driving the next morning, and we got back to Mendocino early enough for me to avoid any bad withdrawal symptoms.

It had stopped snowing and the road had been cleared by the time we left the next morning, but it was still a little slippery and precarious. We saw that it would have been absolute folly to attempt to drive any further the night before, and we saw several cars and trucks whose drivers had been that foolish. Most of them were lying in ditches in various states of disrepair.
We got back to Mendocino, showered, changed, packed, and after a nice lunch in town, we got the hell out of there and drove back to Sacramento - all the way without stopping even once. Home Sweet Home!!

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-25T08:30:00.001+01:00

everyone also needs...

2007-12-23T06:10:00.000+01:00

to read this. Amanda called my attention to it (Thanks, Hon). Consider it the complement to the last link on living with depression. This one is about living with a person who is depressed. I can't quite judge its accuracy as I've always been the person with depression, and my partners have been the ones having to cope with me and my illness. Nevertheless, I think it's quite worth the read. Especially if someone in your life is depressed and you're not sure if or how you can help.

bouncing baby

2007-12-18T19:55:00.001+01:00

Marie got an early Christmas present...

As you can see, she loooooooves it!

everybody needs ...

2007-12-15T02:49:00.001+01:00

... to read this.

Seriously. I'm pretty sure everybody knows at least one person with depression or anxiety or both. And if you're reading my blog because you know me, then I'm certain you do. And if you think you don't, you're probably wrong and you're simply not aware that someone in your circle of friends and acquaintances struggles with mental illness. Anyway, this gal knows what she's talking about, and all I can say about it is amen.

banana bug

2007-12-11T17:49:00.000+01:00

Yeah! Welcome to the wonderful world of solids! After spending the last 36 hours protesting the fact that she wasn't getting any food at the dinner table, Marie finally got her first taste of big kids' food. Although it was new and strange, our adventurous little munchkin was all smiles while I fed her a few teensie spoonfuls of mashed banana. Don't worry - Grandpa Born took pictures of the momentous event, but you'll have to wait a little to see them 'cause he used a "real" camera.

On another note, I think I forgot to tell y'all about Marie's 6-month checkup. She's developmenrally right on target and very strong for her age. She's 65 cm long/tall (that's 25.6 inches) and weighs 8050 grams (17 lbs 12 oz). She's also allergic to our new laundry detergent, which means we have to go back to using the expensive eco-friendly one. I guess Marie's just a "green" baby.

no end in sight

2007-12-09T18:09:00.000+01:00

Well, these teeth are simply not letting up. Every day it seems to get even more intense. We've moved on to giving Marie chilled things to chew on - something she didn't like only a few days ago. But now madame is très cranky and very happy to have something cold to relieve the pain. She has had happy moments, though, many of which she has spent on her brand new throne. Yes, Her Majesty, Sovereign Ruler of Her Universe, has a high chair. Watch out, world!

raging teeth

2007-11-28T23:13:00.000+01:00

Marie has been teething on and off since she was 3 months old, but this is that times a hundred. This is ridiculous. She's so irritable, she bites down on stuff soooo hard. Seriously, you wouldn't think that someone who as yet has no teeth could bite down on your finger quite so hard and cause you quite so much pain. The good news, however, is twofold. First, it's crankiness and not full-on meltdownness, which means she's much more high maintenance, but she's not screaming all day. Second, there's an end (or a respite, at least) in sight, as you can actually see that all four of her front incisors are coming in. Still, I'll be glad when she's cut her first couple of teeth and it calms down a bit.

On an unrelated note, it seems Marie is developing a real sense of humor. I was able to get her to laugh for the first time yesterday (Toffi has been able to get her to do it for a few days now. I guess he's funnier than I am.)! It was definitely one of those you-know-you're-a-parent-now moments because I went to great and silly lengths to get a giggle out of her. What did it in the end was me clucking and flapping my arms like a chicken. Yup. There I was, sitting in the living room making chicken noises at a baby (what have I become?). And my silliness was rewarded with an honest-to-god chuckle. I don't know when babies normally develop the ability to find something genuinely funny, but I'm pretty proud of my little one and her awareness that her mom looks like a complete jackass while impersonating a farm animal.

blue eyes

2007-11-24T20:57:00.000+01:00

tapping tootsies

2007-11-20T12:34:00.000+01:00

We've got feet, people. Marie has discovered hers and is head-over-heels in love. Working at the computer is a little cumbersome, what with my screen issues, but rest assured that we're all doing great and are enjoying Marie's fascination with her feet.

mayday

2007-11-05T10:59:00.000+01:00

My computer is nearly dead. More specifically, the screen is on its last legs. When I start up, the screen is black. If I tilt it a little, it'll light up suddenly and then go black again. If I hold it at a certain angle, it'll stay lit up. But who knows how long that will work. I think it's only a matter of time before this machine becomes no longer salvageable. So if you have anything important to tell me, you might want to call or send a text message rather than email me. I will, in the meantime, be mourning the impending loss of my main line to the outside world...

left-brained logical

2007-11-04T14:59:00.000+01:00

The Right Brain vs Left Brain Test If you see dancer rotating clockwise, you are right-brained (creative), counter-clockwise, left-brained (logical).

This is a trip. When I first showed it to him, Toffi and I spent several minutes arguing about the (im)possibility of us seeing the dancer spin in exactly opposite directions. For me, the dancer clearly spins counter-clockwise. For Toffi, she's a clockwise kinda girl. In fact, Toffi was so sure of her clockwise nature and so suspicious of my deviant sight that he had to open the link on his computer, as if my computer was involved in some conspiracy with me. Yes, my laptop and I are in cahoots. Once he had accepted the fact that we really did see two different things and after we had been talking about the strangeness of that fact for a while, I suddenly saw her spinning clockwise out of the corner of my eye. We then both started staring at her, willing her to change directions. I had the most success when looking just to the side of her. But then she always went back to her default counter-clockwise spinning. Clearly, I could only trick my brain for a few revolutions. Seriously, you'd think we were stoned the way we were fascinated by this mere spinning silhouette.

too busy to write

2007-10-30T09:11:00.000+01:00

So Toffi's been back for a few days, which is soooooo nice. We've all been peachy. But yesterday Marie had her third round of vaccinations and was consequently a very needy baby all day and night. She had a fever that got up to 39.1° C (102.4° F), and that is still hovering around 38.5 (101.3). It also looks like she caught Toffi's cold. But whatever. We'll get through that too. In the meantime, some recent photos...

halftime

2007-10-23T21:34:00.000+02:00

Four days and counting. So far, so good.

I don't want to jinx myself by saying this, but so far, this hasn't been as bad as I was afraid it would be. My friend Caterina stayed with me for part of the weekend, and today I had coffee with a friend who has a toddler, a newborn and a husband who has to travel a lot for work (which has sort of put things into perspective for me). Toffi's sister has taken the dog off my hands for a good 4 hours every day, and I've actually enjoyed taking him for his morning walks. Toffi and I talk on the phone each evening after Marie goes to bed, and he tells me about Russia and I tell him about babyland.

There is one thing that's got me pretty pissed, though. Toffi's in Murmansk, which is north of the Arctic Circle. I'm in Berlin, which is decidedly not. Nevertheless, ever since he left Berlin, it has been colder here than it is there. I am not even kidding. It is freezing here, and the irony is that Toffi was worried that he didn't have warm enough clothes to pack for his trip. He should have left them here so that I could wear them!

Oh, and to all the people who have written emails to me in the last few days: I will get around to replying soon! I promise!