Autumn at Oak Hollow

If you choose to indulge in multiple pitchers of sangrias this summer, please remember to wait the appropriate amount of time before nursing your infant.



A drunk baby is no lauging matter.

We bought the flag in the above picture at a dollar store earlier this week. As I was walking back into the garage after hanging it, I caught Nathan staring intently at the flag as it waved in the breeze.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I'm just making sure you're not in distress," he said.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"If you hang a flag a certain way it's a signal you're in distress. I just wanted to make sure you weren't sending out a distress signal.

I sighed. "Nathan, this is the suburbs. If we're in distress, we dial 911."

Having your baby sacked out while you drag your junk out to the garage to sell...priceless.

Yesterday both of my parents spent some time with their own mothers. My mom went to the flea market in Shipshewana, Indiana with her mother and her mother’s friend and my father went to the cemetery with his.

I’ve not always gotten along with my paternal grandmother. It’s a long, complicated story that involves us not speaking to each other for five years. We both can be difficult and bull-headed. At one time we were like two rams charging at each other with neither one coming out as the winner.

Things are good between us now, thanks to Autumn. We’re much more relaxed when we’re together now that we can focus our attentions outside of ourselves. Grandma is so busy being in love with her great-granddaughter that she all but forgets about everyone and everything that irritates her, including me. It’s like in those submarine movies when the missiles are headed towards the sub and the captain yells “release the countermeasures!” and the little thingies spit out and shake in the water to deflect the blast away from the sub. Autumn is my countermeasure.

My father, on the other hand, is not as lucky. He hates conflict but often finds himself facing the missiles without a countermeasure in sight. Thankfully Grandma doesn’t seem to get mad at him as often as she does everyone else, but he still hates having to try and put out a fuse that’s been lit no matter who the target is.

So yesterday he and my grandmother visited my grandpa’s grave. Grandma brought along a wreath to place in front of Grandpa’s crypt. From what I heard, it was a very nice wreath complete with little flags to honor Grandpa’s status as a veteran. When they arrived at the crypt, however, Grandma was horrified to see the exact wreath she held in her hands already sitting in place in front of Grandpa’s name.

She instantly fingered my dad’s uncle, Grandpa’s brother, as the culprit. He had no right, she said. Grandpa was her husband and it was her duty to decorate his grave. She picked up the wreath already there and replaced it with her own identical wreath.

Grandma and Dad made the rounds, next visiting Grandma’s sister. Grandma, still fuming and still clinging to the offending wreath, decided to place the decoration on her sister’s marker. Since her sister wasn’t a veteran, she enlisted my dad’s help in plucking the little flags out of the wreath.

All the while my dad was becoming more and more uncomfortable. There they were pulling apart a wreath that, while identical to theirs, wasn’t theirs at all. Someone somewhere had taken the time and spent the money to honor Grandpa. Grandma, on the other hand, figured the party involved, obviously family, deserved to have his wreath taken apart for not respecting her place as Grandpa’s widow.

The last stop was to Grandpa’s parents, my great-grandparents. There my dad and grandma observed markers without decoration or flowers. It was at that point that Grandma started to question the origins of the other wreath. Had Grandpa’s brother placed the wreath at Grandpa’s crypt, he would have surely also placed something at his own parents’ graves.

“Oh. Maybe the VFW brought that other wreath,” Grandma said.

My dad learned a long time ago that it’s sometimes best to just keep your mouth shut.

After a three week absence, we finally made it to church yesterday morning. We decided to leave Autumn in the nursery this time because she's been getting a little noisy. She babbles, screams and farts very loudly to the point that we're not as quick to claim her as ours. Instead, we'll turn our heads from side to side with annoyed looks on our faces as though it was someone else's child making the rude noises.

Much to my relief, she didn't seem at all traumatized by her stay in the nursery. She had Conner (Ryan and Marla's boy) to hang out with not to mention a room full of brightly colored toys at her disposal.

When we picked her up after the service, I noticed the nursery coordinator had put a name tag on Autumn's back but the "n" at the end of her name was crossed out so that it read "Autum." I went over to the nursery log where I had signed Autumn in and, sure enough, I had misspelled her name.

Autum

The crossed-out letter on the name tag was evidence that someone knew the correct spelling of my daughter's name but that someone was not me. I do that a lot. I'll leave letters off words or insert them when they're not needed. I am totally spell check's bitch, but there's no such tool when you're checking your kid into the church nursery.

The lost "n" bugged me so I tore the name tag off Autumn's back and went over to the log to insert the missing letter. Even though we'd already picked her up, I couldn't let the church people think Autumn's mommy was an illiterate slob, or worse, some fruitcake who would actually name her daughter Autum.

I hate peas.

I know I’ve mentioned that before, but I’ll say it again.

I hate peas.

I think this hatred stems from memories of being held hostage at the dinner table until every pea was eaten. I couldn’t stomach them and would gag obnoxiously with every spoonful I was forced to swallow. Eventually my parents told me I didn’t have to clean my plate all the time, but that was when I started getting fat and they figured forcing me to eat anything was probably not a good idea.

Yesterday the pediatrician gave us the green light to start feeding Autumn fruits and veggies. I’ve been buying little jars of food for a few weeks now in preparation for this. Considering how passionate I’ve been about my pea hatred over the years though, my mother worried that my attitude would filter down to my daughter, thus denying her the full rainbow of baby nutrition. I think Mom had visions of me sticking a spoonful of peas in Autumn’s face saying, “Yucky peas taste like poo. Blech!”

Since I didn’t want to be blamed for raising a second generation pea-hater, I decided we’d try Autumn out on peas first. That way if she actually ended up hating them, I would be vindicated but couldn’t be held responsible if she really did think yucky peas taste like poo. I could claim I tried to get her to eat them and spend the rest of my life content to know a single pea, pureed or otherwise, would never again enter my house.

Wouldn’t you know she just loves them? I wanted to gag as soon as I popped the lid off the jar, but Autumn seemed quite happy to consume many spoonfuls as you can see here in this video:

Today Autumn is six months old. Hello! Are we in some weird time/space flux because I could have sworn I was holding a newborn just yesterday. I can now understand how my mother feels when she says “I can’t believe I have a daughter who’s thirty-four!” Mom? You can say that a little less often, thanks.

In honor of this day, I was going to re-tell Autumn’s birth story in more detail than I did just days after she was born, but I got a ways into writing and found the story to be utterly and completely boring. Part of that could be the way I was writing it, but when you’re robbed of the drama of telling your husband “its time” because your daughter doesn’t care to leave her cushy sac of amniotic fluid, there’s really no way to punch things up into an interesting story.

Instead, I want to tell the story of the first night Autumn and I were left alone together. It was Thursday night, the day after she was born. I told Nathan to go home and get some rest because neither of us had slept much since Monday night, so he picked up Molly from Ryan and Marla’s and went home to sleep.

He left about 9 pm, right around the time “Alias” was starting. It was the one where Sydney was on an op with Rene in Rome, all decked out in a leopard print coat and Marilyn Monroe wig when she runs into her professor from college who’s all “Sydney Bristow? What are you doing here?” Right about that time Autumn started crying.

What is it? Hungry or a wet diaper? Oh. Dirty diaper.

It was still very hard for me to get out of bed and nigh impossible for me to bend over. I waddled over to the plastic bassinet and loosened up the swaddled blanket to change her diaper and then tried to re-wrap her:

The nurses make this swaddling look so easy. Ok, start with that flap and cross over, pull up the bottom and then cross the other flap over. There we go! But wait, her little foot’s sticking out there. That’s not right. Try again. Now she’s crying again. I just changed her diaper so it can’t be that. Maybe she’s hungry. I’ll go with that.

Now how should we do this? Cradle hold or football? Or cross cradle? What about lying down on my side? Nope, that one’s not going to work, but oh it feels so good to lie down. Wait, don’t fall asleep with the baby next to you. Try the football hold again. Football is good for big busted moms who’ve had c-sections. Ouch! Ok she’s latched. I think she’s latched. No wait, she off again. Let’s stuff that Boppy under the arm here for support. Ok, let’s try that again. C’mon. It’s right there. There you go! Ouch!

At some point during all this I managed to knock the telephone over. Remember how I said I couldn’t bend over? Previous experience with the call button told me that a nurse would be awhile in coming, so I just left the phone where it was and hoped Nathan wasn’t trying to call. Yep, he tried to call. When he couldn’t reach me on the hospital phone he tried my cell phone, which was conveniently packed away in my purse and stuffed in a cupboard. So there I was trying to watch “Alias” while keeping Autumn latched on with the theme from Harry Potter ringing throughout the room.

Are you done? It’s so hard to get out of bed with you in my arms. I think I’ll just hold you for awhile. But I’m so tired. Maybe I can just shut my eyes and rest my head against the pillow. Nope. Better not. Don’t want to drop you. Better put you back in the bassinet and call them to take you to the nursery. I’m sorry, but I haven’t slept since Monday night. I know you can’t possibly care about that, but I’ll be a better mama if I send you away for now.

By the time a nurse came to retrieve Autumn, I had changed her diaper two more times and had my first “what the hell am I doing with a child?” moment when I tried to gently move the bassinet by pushing it with my belly and got Autumn’s foot caught in between my body and the plastic. She cried indignantly, probably wishing she had never seen the outside of a uterus.

I’m sorry! Oh, I’m sorry. Mommy didn’t mean to hurt you. Oh please don’t cry.

In spite of my exhaustion, I couldn’t fall asleep after Autumn was taken away. My mind was racing with thoughts of what my life was going to be like when I took my child home.

Do I have everything I need for her? When is my milk going to come in? What’s Molly going to think of the baby? Will I ever get to sleep again?

Eventually I nodded off only to be awakened about an hour and a half later by a nurse wheeling in Autumn in the bassinet. “Somebody’s hungry,” she said.

It was at that point I started to think this whole thing wasn’t going to be that easy. I wanted to call Nathan and beg him to come back. I didn’t want to be alone with this tiny little being who pooped black tar and didn’t understand that I really, really wanted to get more than 90 minutes of sleep. But she needed me. Even if she didn’t know who the hell I was, she needed me.

I guess we’re kind of stuck with each other, huh?

When I had finished nursing, I pressed the call button again for someone to take Autumn back to the nursery. Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. After a half hour I decided to seek out the nursery myself. It was the first time since I checked into the hospital that I walked more than the few feet from my bed to the bathroom.

Wow these lights are bright, aren’t they? Uh oh, someone’s baby is unhappy. Ok, where’s the nursery? You’ve been there, kid, give me some direction. Ah, there it is. Nope, that’s the door to a maintenance closet. This is the door to the nursery. Bye bye, sweetie.

I was able to sleep almost three hours before they brought her back to me for another feeding. By that time it was morning and the beginning of my last day in the hospital.

And you know what? I still have that episode of “Alias” saved on my DVR. I set it to record the night I left for the hospital. I just can’t bring myself to delete it.

So yesterday was the big freak out. In light of my revelation that I suck as a daughter, I went out to the dollar store for another frame to give to my mother. I drove over there just after 10 am only to find that they don’t open until 11am on Sundays and 11 am just so happened to be Nathan’s desired departure time for the hour drive to his parents’ house.

Since a grocery store is in the same complex, I stopped in there, grabbed a cart and walked around the store hoping for inspiration. Nothing. I then drove to another store I knew would have picture frames but is undergoing a huge renovation. I couldn’t find anything. The dog food is where the pharmacy used to be and the pharmacy is now in the front of the store. The furniture is now where the toys were and I still can’t find the damn picture frames and we have to leave by 11 am!

I finally found the frames and picked out a nice one that was perfect for Nathan’s grandma. I raced home, printed out a picture of Grandma and Autumn and put the framed picture of Autumn that I was going to give Grandma in my mom’s bag, pulled out the Glade candles and replaced it with a nice Bath and Body works candle I had stashed away in a cupboard downstairs.

I was finally able to sit down and take a breath while I fed Autumn. Nathan was signing cards and assembling gift bags and asked, “Where’s my mom’s bag?”

I looked at him. “She doesn’t get a bag. She gets plants,” I said. We bought her a lilac bush and a hydrangea, both of which were sitting out in the garage waiting for the ride to their new home.

“She doesn’t get a picture?” asked Nathan.

Insert scream here.

After much arguing about who gets what and how much time we had before we needed to leave, I convinced Nathan to go to the dollar store and pick up another frame and a gift bag for his mom. He called me a few minutes after he left. “They’re closed for Mother’s Day,” he said.

How can a dollar store not be open on Mother’s Day? Don't they realize there are really cheap procrastinators out there who need to find a Mother's Day gift stat?

Needless to say, we scrapped the picture idea for his mom and vowed to give her one during our next visit.

The rest of the day wasn’t so hectic, thank God. Once at his parents’ house, Autumn was taken out of my hands and I was allowed to nap on the big leather sofa. Autumn fell asleep in the rocking chair with Nathan’s mom and was very put out when we pulled her out of Grandma’s arms when it was time to go.

We met my parents, my brother and my grandmas at Cracker Barrel later in the afternoon. Autumn was passed around the table like a plate of biscuits and didn’t even spit up after having nearly a whole bottle of formula. She sat on my dad’s lap for awhile, banging spoons on the table and dropping them on the floor. Each time she dropped one, someone would pass her another. The busboys probably hated us.

My mother ended up liking her gift. She’s not typically the type who puts a hit out on you after receiving a bad gift, but I wanted at least part of what I gave her to be something meaningful. Hopefully I succeeded with this:

I'm freaking out right now because I didn't plan my mother's gift very well. I asked her the other day what she wanted and she said she'd like the book A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel. So we got that for her and now I'm thinking...okay, what else? I bought this Glade Scented Oil Candle set at Costco because I had a coupon, but that just seems bad...bad. Candles are okay, but Glade candles? Why don't I just give her a pack of lottery tickets and a quarter to scratch them with if I'm going to give her something that says "grocery store shopping"?

This is her first Mother's Day as a grandma and I don't have anything truly special for her. We bought these cute picture frames at the dollar store for the great-grandmas and put a pretty picture of Autumn in it. I took the picture yesterday. Autumn's wearing a hat with a Gerber daisy stuck in it. Nathan did this cool Photoshop thing where he took the color out of every part of the photo except the flower. Did I think to get my mother a frame too? Um, no.

Crap. Crap, crap crap.

My Mother's Day is going well. Nathan gave me a Willow Tree figurine of a mama holding her baby and made me French toast for breakfast. That was nice.

Do you think my mom will be able to tell I bought her card at the dollar store?

CRAP!

Last night we were sitting at a booth at the Chinese buffet. Our attractive waitress would coo and smile at Autumn every time she stopped by our table to take our plates or fill our drinks. After about her third visit or so, I looked at Nathan and said, "You'd totally score if you were a single dad, wouldn't you?"

"Oh yeah," he said.

As I was upstairs getting ready this morning I heard a crash and a shout from Nathan. I rushed downstairs to see what was going on and was greeted by my scowling husband. "She knocked the damn screen door right off its hinges," he said, referring to Molly.

Ah, the rabbits.

I peeked outside just in time to see a small rabbit speed away to parts unknown as Molly attacked the foliage on the edge of our pool deck, obviously thinking she still had the scent and would emerge victorious. We ordered her inside and made sure we let her know just how angry we were.

I guess it's time to take some action. So does anyone know of a humane way to get rid of the rabbits? Perhaps a bag of carrots laid end to end and leading into my neighbor's yard?

We have a colony of rabbits in our yard that have been making Molly go bezerk. She caught one last week and deposited it in front of our upstairs slider just to show us she has skills beyond sneaking pork chops off the kitchen counter when our backs are turned. Now she's all full of herself and thinks she can take down the others. All she does is sit in front of the downstairs slider, pawing at the glass door whenever the rabbits venture out to munch on our grass. Once in awhile we'll hear a yelp, which means she's spotted one and wants out IMMEDIATELY. I usually tap on the door before I open it, you know, just to give the rabbits fair warning of what's coming. They tend to ignore me and only skedaddle when Molly makes her appearance.

Those rabbits, though. They're driving everyone around here crazy.

Last night I was dressing Autumn and had her sitting up on the changing table. She lost her balance and fell back, hitting her head on the edge of the table. There was an audible thunk and then her face turned bright red as she registered the pain. She alternated between a very loud howl and a silent scream where her mouth was open but no sound came out. I felt awful, of course, and tried to console her. She eventually calmed down, but I felt as though I had betrayed her by not making sure she was completely safe.

That incident was pretty much on par with the tone of the day. There seemed to be one mommy-inflicted trauma after another. If I wasn’t sucking boogers out of her nose with the nasal bulb, I was abandoning her on the floor so I could help make dinner and pushing spoonfuls of cereal in her face when she clearly didn’t want it. All fodder for future therapy sessions, I’m sure.

Yesterday wasn’t all bad, though. Autumn made her first trip to the library. This was kind of a big deal since Nathan and I both love to read. We hope to someday pass this love on to our daughter and have already collected some board books that will more likely get soft with baby slobber before they’re ever read.

As we opened the doors to the library, I let out an excited breath and, sounding very much like my mother, exclaimed, “Autumn, this is the library!” I could have said, “this is Disneyworld” and it wouldn’t have made a difference to her, but I thought it was a cool moment. As we walked in, that library smell hit me. The township built a brand new library several years ago so this isn’t the same building I visited when I was a kid, but it smells exactly the same. It’s one of those smells associated with very good memories of my brother and I spending our summer days there.

After the library, we paid a visit to my grandma, who happens to live about five hundred feet from the library’s front door. Autumn wasn’t quite feeling the love and busted out crying the second I put her in Grandma’s arms. She’s been very choosy about the company she keeps lately and doesn’t like being held by someone other than Nathan or me unless she’s in a really good mood (read: not tired, not wet and not hungry). After about half an hour and much soothing and cajoling, Autumn finally decided Grandma was not the devil and happily smiled and bounced on her knee.

Since both Nathan and my grandma love to talk, it was awhile before we got back home. We put Autumn to bed a little later than usual and went to bed ourselves a little later than usual. Autumn is coming down with a cold and we heard her wheezing through the baby monitor as we tried to fall asleep. Around midnight she started crying so I retrieved her from her crib and armed myself with the saline drops and the nasal bulb.

Yes, the abuse continues.

In spite of the dream suggesting otherwise, I did not miss out on the luscious Costco cake. I was able to snag a piece shortly after it was cut. The woman who the cake was for wasn’t so lucky since she was actually at the hospital in labor when we ate it. We heard today that she had a baby boy just under five pounds. So congrats to her and our apologies for not saving any cake.

Since I was the cake-getter, I had to house it in my refrigerator overnight. I thought this was going to be a challenge, you know, trying to stuff a whole half sheet cake into my already full fridge, but it turns out about half the contents of the fridge were way past the point of being edible. Nathan came home from golf Thursday night and saw the tower of Rubbermaid and Tupperware sitting on the kitchen counter, all of them full of things one normally sees in the trash bins of your local high school cafeteria. “All of that stuff is bad?” he asked.

We emptied out the containers together, each of us taking turns asking questions like, “When was the last time we made chicken noodle soup?” and “Is this pancake batter? I don’t even want to know.” Nathan was disgusted and insisted that we should decide if a meal is worth bringing back for a repeat before we pack it up and store the leftovers in the fridge.

The thing is, I don’t know if I’m going to want to eat something again or not. The Dutch part of me absolutely refuses to throw away good food, even if I know it will stay in the fridge until its chemical composition is completely altered. Who knows? Tomorrow I may want pancakes for breakfast and will be very thankful for that half cup of already made batter. More likely I’ll feel like eggs and forget about the batter, but it still has to be there just in case.

This logic extends outside our fridge as well. Nathan and I are planning a garage sale for Memorial Day weekend and have been creating piles in several parts of our house of things we want to sell. One thing we haven’t been able to agree on is the sale of baby clothes. He says baby clothes will draw more buyers to our house and I say we need to keep them in case we decide to have another baby or if we accidentally find ourselves having another. “We do have quite a few things that could work for a boy or a girl,” I said.

“Then sell all the girl stuff and keep the gender neutral stuff,” he said.

“But what if we have another girl?” I asked. “Then we’d have to go out and buy more girls clothes.”

I’m not at all ready for another child. I don’t know if we’ll ever be ready for more than just Autumn, but I have to have those clothes just in case. Plus, by deciding to sell the clothes I am admitting that my daughter is growing up. Yeah, I know biology and all that will keep her sprouting in spite of my protestations, but I can look at those clothes and remember the time when her little body folded perfectly into my chest and her feet barely reached my belly button.

It’s probably best to keep the clothes for now. Blame it on the part of me that’s Dutch and the other part of me that wants to keep my baby a baby as long as I can.

She sits! My baby can sit up! She's good like this for about a minute before she falls over.

I think the rocking has come about since she discovered the joy of the Jumperoo. She loves to bounce on our knees and soil our pants with the contents of her stomach (I had to wash my jeans twice this weekend). We tried to get her to sit by herself last week, but she rocked so vigorously that she just toppled right over. Now she has discovered that she can still rock and maintain her balance. It's funniest when we set her to a musical soundtrack, preferably something from the '80s.

Flipping through the channels recently, I caught a commercial for Always maxi pads. Their new catch phrase, so skillfully woven around the product name, goes like this:

"Have a happy period. Always."

That's exactly how I would describe it. A happy time. Granted, with the exception of the five solid weeks of bleeding after having Autumn, I haven't had my period in about sixteen months and could be considered out of the loop in respect to how one feels when Auntie Flo visits.

Upon visiting the Always website, I was greeted with a flashy little poem that so perfectly sums up that "happy" time:

Um, yeah. I wonder if there was even a woman in the room when this little ditty was penned. I prefer this version:

This is the time of the month to inhale a whole half gallon of
cookie dough ice cream.

This is the time when no smart remark from your
husband should go unpunished.

When the kids will get along just fine without you.

This is the time to wish you were a man so that you could, just once,
have a day in which you didn’t have to think. At all.

And if you feel like smacking someone upside the head, do it
with the knowledge that they probably deserve it.

It’s your period.

You have the right to make everyone around you miserable.

And we’re here to help.

Have a period. At least until menopause.

In spite of my resolution a few days ago that I was going to continue breast feeding as long as I can, I’ve made the decision to start weaning Autumn off the boobie. It wasn’t an easy decision and I’m a little sad about it, but right now there are more reasons to wean than to continue. I’m glad I was able to do it this long. It was more enjoyable than I ever thought it could be.

I consoled myself by shopping and bought this last night:



It’s not a Maclaren or a Peg Perego, but it has nice long handles so that her daddy doesn’t have to hunch over like Quasimodo when he pushes her in it. Hopefully we’ll all be able to go out for a walk tonight.

I have to order a cake for a baby shower we’re having here at work on Friday. I was supposed to order the cake this weekend, but time slipped away from me as it seems to do lately. I went to bed last night thinking, “You must, must get to Costco tomorrow to order that cake.”

Would you believe I dreamt about cake last night? It was a scene straight out of Office Space. We were all gathered around and the cake was going fast. I was just about get myself a piece when I got distracted by something else. I turned back to the cake only to find the whole thing gone. I felt very much like Milton and was so disappointed because I really, truly love cake from Costco.