The Squeaker is doing a good job of keeping us on our toes. I want to do a better job chronicling this crazy ride that is parenthood so I decided to work on our family blog more. This blog will still be my primary blog but the other one will be stuff about our family and pics.
So enjoy: La Casa de Kraft
Image by sierravalleygirl via Flickr
Some friends of ours have recently started baking bread and have been kind enough to give us their extra loaves when they got ’em. This bread is absolutely deeeelicious and inspired me to want to make bread. I think I would have stayed wanting to do this and not actually doing it if it weren’t for a wonderful couple that Kraft knows that has 5 kids. One of the kids is having surgery this week (say a little prayer). The mom told me that the hardest meal that they have to get together is breakfast. So I am trying my hand at baking bread so maybe it will give them a hand come breakfast time.
This morning I started by making scones since they are pretty easy and require no yeast. They turned out good. This upped my confidence for actual yeast bread. Just 5 minutes ago I pulled my first batch of bread out of the oven. Two huge and weirdly shaped but pretty nonetheless honey wheat loaves. It is amazing to see dough rise.
I’m just really excited. We just tasted it and it wasn’t knock your socks off bread but it wasn’t bad like I was expecting it to be. Baking bread is kinda like making tamales, it’s pretty time intensive because of all the steps but it’s not hard and is pretty fun. I can’t wait to make a couple other kinds of bread tomorrow.
Makes you not ever want grocery store bread again.
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This is another golden tip from some book that I read about baby sleep. Seems pretty common sense but you come to find that to a sleep deprived parent, few things are common sense. The Squeaker has been such a bad sleeper that when I figured out I could nurse her to sleep lying in bed, I thought I had hit the jackpot. Problem is now I can only put her to sleep like this. So when we’re all in bed and she starts to squirm and I know she is going to wake up, yes I feed her, and yes, sometimes she is asleep. So I do in fact feed a sleeping baby sometimes but I don’t do it as often as before. Now I wait and see if she can put her self to sleep. Anywho…
There are a few things that I am getting tired of:
1) People talking to me as if I’m stupid for co-sleeping with O.
2) Co-sleeping with O.
So, #1, I guess I run in some pretty hippy mom circles where co-sleeping is valued and seen as good parenting. But recently I have had a lot of encounters with people who don’t have kids and who talked to me as if I didn’t know the first thing about being a good mom. There is really no topic quite as controversial as how you get your baby to sleep. Every single mom feels guilty about the way they get to their kid to sleep. Including me. Every time I tell someone that O sleeps in bed with us I feel like I need to explain why. I feel like they are judging me and think that I am doing the wrong thing.
You know what? That’s it. I’m not going to feel bad anymore and other moms shouldn’t either. I have talked at length to moms about how they get their kids to sleep and every single one of them does something that they feel uncomfortable telling you about and feel like they have to justify it. Moms that have their kid sleep in their own crib in their own room and had to let their kid cry until putting themselves to sleep will say that there was no other way that worked and this was their last resort. Moms that sleep with their baby in bed with them will say the same thing. Moms that put their baby to sleep on their stomach will say the same thing. We don’t need to explain why we do this to anyone. The name of the game is survival. You do what puts your baby to sleep so that you can get just enough sleep not to go crazy.
I do believe that there are a lot of things that moms can do that make them bad moms. Here are some examples: put soda in your kid’s bottle, not giving your kid a chance to like veggies and always feeding them chicken nuggets and quesadillas, letting them play Halo and Grand Theft Auto, etc. But sleeping with your baby, putting your baby in a crib, or letting them sleep on their stomach is not one of them.
So next time I am talking to you and the topic of co-sleeping with O comes up don’t tell me that you think babies should sleep in cribs and don’t tell me that you know someone whose aunt’s hairdresser’s tax attorney’s dog groomer rolled over and smothered their baby after coming home drunk one night. Don’t want to hear it.
#2 I have been thinking for a while that it is time to transition O into a crib. Not because I want her out of our bed, but because she sleeps pretty well when she is asleep in our bed by herself but when I get in bed she wakes up about every hour. I think she would sleep better in her crib. And now that she is starting to be more mobile, I am worried about her being able to crawl off the bed. (It is a commonly known precaution that if your baby sleeps in bed with you you should put your mattress on the floor to prevent this from happening.) Thing is, I just have not built up the resolve that I need to fight this battle. I am very sleep deprived at the moment and the thought of rocking O to sleep for hours and then her waking up 5 minutes after I put her in her crib makes me want to cry. So I’m working on it. Not to mention, we have a queen size bed which was fine until she started getting so big and likes to sleep with her arms outstretched as if she was Jesus.
Just like all families, we are a work in progress.
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I’ve known about Busted Halo for a while since it is powered by the Paulist Fathers and I’m married to Kraft. I even used some of their material for lesson plans last year. But I’ve been reading more of it recently. It is a really good website. They seem unafraid to tackle big issues and ask tough questions. They don’t dance around things and try to get straight answers.
During our recent house hunting, 2 out of the 8 homes that we have seen are being sold by gay couples that have adopted children and want to move to a bigger place. This has gotten me thinking about the Church and homosexuality. What do they have on their home page? An interview between a nun and her openly gay cousin who is living with his partner. It’s a good read.
Take a gander.
Man, I am pooped. It has been a whirlwind of a couple weeks. With house hunting and Easter and my college friends coming into town this past weekend, I am really tired. But really happy. (Well, the house hunting doesn’t make me happy. It makes me really anxious and I feel like if I am not constantly checking the MLS then the perfect house is slipping through our fingers.)
Easter was great but that’s another post.
On Wednesday, 3 of my best friends from college came to Austin to finally meet the Squeaker. I love those girls. We has so much fun in school. And I had forgotten how different all of us are from each other. We have the business oriented, tough as nails one; the quirky, always up for an adventure musician; the hippy, gluten/dairy free screenwriter; and me, the mom. I miss them so much. I love hanging out with them. We didn’t get to do tons while they were here because we had to work around O’s nap/sleeping schedule but we managed to get some good stuff in.
$1 margaritas at El Arroyo on Thursday were amazing. It was the first margarita I have had since last Dec 2008. It was cold and salty and heavenly. I only had one and it was about 5oz but it was awesome.
Then on Friday night Kraft was on O duty and me and the girls went dancing at the Broken Spoke. We had so much fun. I loooove dancing but get super nervous because I am not good at it. So I spend most of the night nervous that someone is going to ask me to dance but secretly hoping they will because I love it. This place was great because it was just a bunch of old guys that take you for a spin around the dance floor then walk you back to your seat. Such gentlemen. No sleazy guys trying to hit on you. It was fun. I definitely want to go again.
O loved them. She did not sleep very well because she loved hanging out with them. I tried to put her to sleep at her regular time but she did not want to sleep. She wanted to be with everyone else. It’s funny how metiche (busybody) she is. Tonight was the first night since Wednesday that she has fallen asleep before 11pm.
So this is why I haven’t blogged in a while. Sorry if this one is kind of rambly. I’m tired and not witty at the moment. I got some good topics in my head though that I want to get out. Hopefully those will come in the next couple days.
For now, I’m just really thankful for my community of friends.
Image by Casey Serin via Flickr
I’ve been kinda flaky with blogging for the last week or so. I blame this on the fact that me and Brandon have been obsessed with combing trulia.com for houses.
We were on our way home from Mass a couple of Sundays ago and a house was on sale just down the street from St. Ignatius. They also were having an open house at that exact moment. Ok, we’ll bite. So we walked in and really liked it. It is in the exact location that we would love to live. When the Squeaker is old enough to go to St. Ignaitus, we could just walk her to and from school everyday. And it had a big backyard that we fell in love with. The idea of planting orange and avocado trees is almost too much to handle. And picturing having parties in that backyard. Love it. So we started just browsing for homes around the same area just to see some comparables (as any good HGTV watcher would know to do).
We set up an appt to see it again this past weekend. And just by chance a house on the next block over was having an open house. We saw the first one and then went to the open house. Uh, fell in looove with, not the first house, but this open house house. The second I walked in it seemed perfect. Open and light-filled. Heck, it even had a nursery with the most adorable mural of a hippo and monkeys and a toucan. My dad said the hippo has O’s eyes. It was a beautiful home.
So here we are not even thinking about buying a house and a week later finding one that feels like home. Things went super fast at this point. We contacted a realtor, got pre-qualified (which apparently you have to do) and put in an offer for the house today. Someone had already put in an offer before us but we knew we were offering more than them.
They didn’t take our offer. It all just happened so quickly and seemed so perfect that I felt like this is really what God wanted us to do. It just seemed very easy. Guess not. It is a bummer. But from the beginning I told myself that if this is what God had planned for us then it would work out.
I can’t help but feel personally offended by these homeowners, though. We met our realtor at the house today to do a walk through before putting in the offer and the mom came in with her baby twins. She was not warm or welcoming but instead seemed very flustered and irritated. Apparently the twins were not having anything to do with the walk they were on. But O was with me and she saw her. Who the heck can say no to the Squeaker? With those pudgy cheeks? Jerkfaces.
I got the call from our realtor about the rejection in the middle of Specs. Me and O were with our good friend, M. Specs was doing this thing where they offer samples of 30 beers and different cheeses and snacks they have. Brilliant is what it is. And yes, I was in fact that lady with a baby in a liquor store sampling beers. Don’t worry, if what I drank added up to half a beer I’d be surprised. No one seemed too offended. Had I gotten this news in any other place I feel that I would have been much more bummed. You can’t feel too bad while drinking free beer.
(Side note – please try Leinenkugels Berry Weiss or Summer Sandy beer. Delicious. Girly, but delicious.)
Oh well. I’m not sure if I want to continue the house search right now. I feel like maybe this is God telling us to back off. But I have been wrong about what God has planned for us before. Our realtor was very upbeat that there would be other fish in the sea. I guess we’ll see.
I’ll just keep dreaming about those orange trees.