The kinderlach chronicles

1. Somewhat rashly, I decided to thumb my nose at the Stroller Curse. I bought a snap 'n' go, which, for the uninitiated, is a stroller frame meant to transport an infant car seat. I should have bought it a while ago--it makes it much easier to go somewhere when the baby's asleep without waking up the baby. I put it together yesterday and we all took a walk--Iyyar in the carseat, Barak holding the side, me pushing, MHH following along. With this arrangement, once we got to the grocery store, Barak found himself at unprecedented liberty--not in stroller OR top of shopping cart. Not surprisingly, he immediately scoped out the ice cream freezer, and with his sweetest, winningest smile, said, "Imma, Barak hold it ikeem, 'kay?" I don't want to eat the ice cream, no no, chas v'shalom. I just want to hold it. Really!

2. Saba and Savta left yesterday. My children are blessed and fortunate to have not one, but two sets of honorary grandparents; Saba and Savta means Grandpa and Grandma in Hebrew. When asked how many grandchildren they have, they count mine; pictures of my kids are on their fridge; when Barak was born, Savta was the one who sent me a whole baby layette priority mail. They rock. She and Saba drove 12 hours each way to visit us for Shabbos, and gave Barak and Iyyar the full grandparent treatment, including the aforementioned John Deere trucks, lots of attention, and lots of cuddles. After they left, Barak was, well, bereft. He kept peeking into their room, looking perturbed. He kept saying to himself, "Where Savta go? Find out?" and looking in the places where he himself had been hiding in recent games of "Where'd Barak go?" Finally he came up to me and said, "Where Saba Savta go?" I said, "They went home, sweetie." He looked sad. "Saba Savta home? Grandma home?" I know he doesn't really know that Saba Savta and Grandma actually live within walking distance of each other, but still...

3. Iyyar is starting to really really smile. He looks like a cross between a chubby toothless old man and a very happy garden gnome. Today, for the first time, he sat up just holding my fingers--he has the back strength and the balance now.

4. He still sleeps with me and nurses much of the night, but sleeps longer stretches, I think. Every so often, he will wake up, realize he's teetering on the brink of malnutrition, and wake me up by sort of scrabbling at me; if I don't wake up right away, he gets annoyed, starts to kick, and ends up pushing down on my stomach with his feet and rappelling up me until I get woken up by being nose-to-nose with a starving, enraged elf. This happens multiple times a night. It was a little unnerving until I got used to it.

5. B"H Barak has not been really jealous of Iyyar. He would like to get more attention than he gets, but he hasn't really been taking it out on the baby. The one thing he does do is get very angry if I sit down with the baby--because then I'm about to focus my attention on someone else. His usual response is, "No Imma sit! No Imma nursing baby!" Sometimes, in an effort to be polite, he will come up to me, attempt to haul me bodily out of the chair (fat chance--I have twenty pounds to go) and say, "Imma up! Imma 'cuse me PEESS!" I've been trying to explain to him that you don't go around telling other people to get up out of their chairs because you don't want them to sit, and even saying please does not make this behavior polite.

6. A few weeks ago, for the first time, Barak started with some really calculated misbehavior. It was just at a different level from previous experimentation--it was, hmm, what will Imma do if I totally defy her? So we started with timeouts. A typical exchange will go like this:

Me: Barak, come here please.

(No response)

Me: Barak, come here please. I said come here.

(No response)

Me: Barak, I said come here. Do you want me to count?

Barak: No Imma count!

Me: So come here, please.

(No response.)

Me. One. (Pause.) Come here, please. Two. (Pause). Barak, I said come here. Do you want to go into your crib? (Pause. Sigh.) Three. Okay, in your crib, two minutes.

Barak: NOOOOOOOOOOO! No night-night! NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I deposit a howling Barak into his crib and close the door. Wails of misery issue forth. Two minutes later, I go get him, give him a kiss, explain to him that when Imma says come, he does what? Barak says, "Please!" and comes out. The next few times I ask him to come, he comes. Or not. And then we do it all again.

7. There isn't any number 7. But I'm done pumping for the evening, and I can only justify blogging while attached to my Medela, so I'm putting the milk in the fridge, cleaning up the kitchen, and going to bed.

Bibi at his best

Translated from Netanyahu's Hebrew, not by me.

BBC interviewer: "How come so many more Lebanese have been killed in this conflict than Israelis?"

Netanyahu: "Are you sure that you want to start asking in that direction?"

BBC interviewer: "Why not?"

Netanyahu: "Because in World War II more Germans were killed than British and Americans combined, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the war was caused by Germany's aggression. And in response to the German blitz on London, the British wiped out the entire city of Dresden, burning to death more German civilians than the number of people killed in Hiroshima. I also want to remind you that in 1944 when the British wanted to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, your pilots missed the target and burned down a children’s hospital with 83 Danish kids in it. Perhaps you have another question?"

Sunday afternoon chez Uberimma

I am in a much better mood today than I have been in in recent weeks. The Conversation has been had with my boss, and two of the worst speeches (in terms of how long it would have taken me to write them) have been offloaded to a freelancer, and an intern has been put on notice that she's going to be doing some of my research. Gyongyi came and cleaned, and the bathtub is no longer grimy. The heat broke, and the windows are now open. Both Barak and Iyyar are napping, and have been for an hour, during which I raced frantically around the house picking up.

But best of all, Barak and Iyyar's Saba and Savta are here, after a 13-hour drive on Thursday (good thing they decided not to fly, huh?) I talked to Ada the babysitter from work on Friday. "Barak is in love," she told me. And the living room is a parking garage of toy John Deere trucks and tractors--they brought a whole set, instantly blowing every single one of Barak's little-boy-truck-adoration fuses.

Details to follow, but I'm not wasting any more of my visit time blogging.

A poll

I really really really don't have time for a post, but it's been a while, and besides, I am sort of getting sick of looking at the picture that makes my stunning stunning curtains look like something that might hang in the windows of a Florida motel.

So, time for a question for all my fearless readers.

What reading material is in your bathroom, right now? Now, be honest. I don't read in the bathroom myself, but you can tell a lot about our household by what's on the floor of the bathroom. Especially Orthodox Jews, who read things in the bathroom they might not read elsewhere. Until I picked up the pile to bring it to the computer, we had:

The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlusson, translated from the Icelandic by Jean I. Young (guess who this belongs to? Not me)
The Making of the Middle Ages, by WR Southern (see previous parenthetical comment)
an Astro City comic (see above, again)
Richard Scarry's Counting Book (a fine piece of literature)
and Cars and Trucks and Things that Go (another fine piece of literature, with Goldbug!)

Goldbug, by the way, is a little, um, gold bug, who appears here and there Where's Waldo-style throughout the book. Barak loves it. "Where Goldbug go?" "I don't know, Barak. Let's find out!" "Find out?"

Oh, and as a postscript to "night-night tomorrow," apparently I have a hierarchy of near-antonyms for "later." Depending on when I think I might do what Barak wants me to do, I might say "just a minute," "soon," "in a little while," "later," or "tomorrow." If Barak is campaigning for something I'm not planning on doing it in the foreseeable future--for example, taking the bus or going to Baskin-Robbins--I'll say, "Maybe another time."

Why do I now know this? Because lately, Barak has been trying them all. Last week, on the way home from a walk, he wanted to check that night-night wasn't next on the agenda. (It wasn't.)

"No night-night."

"No, no night-night now."

"No night-night soon?"

"No, not for a while."

"Night-night maybe another time."

In which I continue to not blog about the war

Hey, look! Pictures!

What's this? Well, this is the computer from which I am writing this blog. It's new. It came last week, because I finally had to give back the laptop I borrowed from work about a year ago.

But that's not what's exciting. What's exciting is what's behind it:

the beautifullest curtains ever, which look sort of, well, schvach in this picture. Here's a closeup:

Better, huh? Imagine totally saturated pinks and purples and turquoises, cut through with lime green and yellow vines. Now imagine that you have them in a west-facing window. Now imagine the afternoon sun lighting up the vines... mmm.

And did I mention the sequins?

Mmm.

These are the curtains Deb made for me from fabric she got at a sari shop while she was here. I had to clean up the entire guest room to do them justice.

More pictures:

Our cat, standing on the guest-room bed. You can sort of see in the picture that it has lime green walls.

And yes, she really can shoot laser beams from her eyes. She's talented that way.

And what's this stunning cable pattern? It's the sweater that is stuffed in a plastic bag in an apartment somewhere in Sydney, waiting for its turn. When it's done, it's going to be mine!!

Some of my knitting, pre-bedrest (no, those are not my feet):

And the reason why I'm probably going to wait a long time for my Aran sweater (none of those are my feet either):

More reasons not to blog about the war

Because Sarah does it so much better.

If you're not quite sure what's going on in Israel, and have a tiny little suspicion that you're not getting the whole story from CNN, maybe you should bookmark her blog.

Stinker

Iyyar nursed pretty much all night long last night. He had an upset stomach, or something, last night, and the nightly screamfest, which has been as short as 15 minutes recently, went on for HOURS. By the time I went to bed I didn't even make an attempt at putting him down--I just took him with me and let him have fun. Around 6 am, I woke up and realized that he had literally been at it all night. He was soaked, I was soaked, etc.

The plus to this is that if your baby nurses all night, it does very good things for your supply. Wishing to take full advantage, I eased myself away from him and sneaked off to the back bedroom to pump. Halfway there, I heard him wake up. "He's fine," I called to MHH. "Just give him a pacifier. He should go back to sleep."

Nuh-uh. I could hear him howling for the next ten minutes, and finally couldn't stand it anymore. Put the milk in the fridge. Got back into bed. Started nursing Iyyar. Two happy minutes on one side and then

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!! I'm STAAAARVING!!!"

Two happy minutes on the other side, then--you guessed it--

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!! I'm STAAAARVING!!!"

Back and forth a few more times. Pacifier? Fat chance. I'm STARVING, Imma!! Don't you understand! Piteous wails, mouth open, desperate for FOOD. Okay, fine, maybe I was wrong, maybe you really are hungry. I hauled myself back out of bed, took the pumped milk out of the fridge, put a couple ounces in a bottle, handed it to MHH--he can do this, right? and went back to sleep.

Baby attacks bottle like his life depends on it.

For thirty seconds. He took a QUARTER OF AN OUNCE.

Then he went to sleep. For two hours.

And now I have to throw all that milk out--can't freeze it once he's drunk from it.

Stinker.

The wall

is what I have hit.

I can think of a few things I should be doing less than I should be writing this blog post, but not many. Messing up the kitchen further would be one. Maybe knitting would be another. Eating the chocolate chip cookie dough that I got as far as mixing, but not baking, would be pretty high on the list. At least I'm not doing that.

I am starting to realize that something in my life is going to have to give. I have, B"H, a bright and active kid and a vocal and active baby. They need me. I have a home, which needs to be at least moderately tidy for our health and my sanity. Everyone needs to eat, and they should have vegetables a heck of a lot more often than they're currently getting them. I have a husband, on whom I am taking out way too many of my current frustrations. And, oh yes, there's that job. From which I just took twelve weeks of leave, with no one really covering my absence.

Right now there simply are not enough hours in the day even for the very basics. I cannot take care of Iyyar and Barak, keep the house running, and do my job. Even if I did nothing else, I couldn't do everything that's being asked of me at work--and I am not willing to do nothing but work.

What's going to give? Well, I'm going to be looking for cleaning help again, that's one thing. Even though it's expensive and we can't really afford it; even though I dislike, philosophically, the idea of hiring someone else to clean up after me and my messes. The reality is that I can earn a lot more in an hour than I would pay someone to clean; I'd rather spend an extra two hours working than six cleaning, because it gives me more time with my kids.

And I'm going to have to have a talk with my boss. I'm sort of dreading this, because I know that a big part of the reason I'm valuable is that I always come through. But I just can't. There are only so many hours in the day, and I'm about to have to waste more of them with the commute and, oh yes, pumping.

I don't know what else to do. I already barely knit, I don't waste time on the Internet unless I'm multitasking (pumping, usually), and socializing is now strictly a Shabbos activity, unless combined with Barak time. We had friends over for dinner tonight who are in for the summer from Israel, and it just torpedoed my day (not to mention my mood). It's after 10 and I have a trashed kitchen, two overtired (but finally both sleeping, B"H) kids, and almost nothing done on the speech I'm working on. Speech #1 of 14. Oh yeah, and I'm supposed to be making a meal for a friend with a new baby, and there are so many things, just random things, that I need to do, like go to the post office and write that letter to the hospital and deal with Iberia and, and, and...

And finish that speech that's open in another window on this computer right now.

This about says it

I haven't been saying anything about the war, because frankly, I can't deal, and if I started writing anything it would turn into a major rant and just get me unproductively upset. But if you want the kitzer version of how this war started--well, you aren't going to get it from the
NY Times, but you can find it here.

Guess what just showed up in the mail?

Hint: it wasn't an underexposed photo of whole-wheat gomasio bagels.

Hmm. Maybe this has something to do with the pile of laundry on the bedroom floor. Oh, no, wait. I can blame that on the Nine Days!

First week back at work

It's Friday and in one short week of part-time work (and working at home at that!) the entire house has fallen into ruin, I haven't cooked one decent meal, and Shabbos is officially up to MHH. I'm realizing now that my leave consisted entirely of childcare and housework; the time that was once devoted to housework is now going toward paid work, and nothing--but nothing--is getting done. And Marika neni is gone.

How does anyone do it with two kids and a full-time job? How??

Wishful thinking

I'm sitting at my computer (duh) where I should be writing a speech, the first of not one, not two, but FOURTEEN speeches that need to be written by mid-September (that's two a week, folks, and I'm part-time, plus there's that video script and, and, and...) but I cannot resist mentioning what happened this afternoon.

So.

Sometimes Barak will make a reasonable request that is not grantable right at the moment of its asking. For example, I won't give him granola at dinnertime, or take him to the park at naptime, or change the baby's diaper because I just did it and Barak wants me to do it again. In these instances, I usually say "We'll do it later," or "We'll do it tomorrow." So, for example, it'll be bathtime, and Barak will start talking about what he'd really rather be doing (for example, eating ice cream.) The conversation will go something like this:

Barak: Ikeem?

Me: No, sweetheart. It's not time for ice cream now.

Barak: Ikeem pish potty?

Me: Sure, you can pish on the potty, but you don't get ice cream for that. You get a chocolate chip for pishing on the potty, right?

Barak: Ikeem shabbos?

Me: Right, we have ice cream on shabbos.

Barak (being as winsome as possible): Ikeem shabbos? Ikeem?

Me: No, it's not Shabbos now. It's Shabbos tomorrow.

Barak [considering this acceptable]: Shabbos tomorrow.

Got that? Good. So, today, Barak figured it should work both ways. I picked him up from camp and we were walking home, me holding his hand and with Iyyar in the sling. Barak's lunch (PB on leftover homemade whole-wheat challah, a cheese stick, a banana and juice) had gone over very well, and he was telling me about it. "Sammish! Sammish lunch! Cheese! Cheese juice!" He also told me about his day in general. "Water! Water splash! Water swimming! Water giraffe! Giraffe innair! Sammish! Cheese! Camp fun! Fun house! Sammish juice!" Then, a block from our house, he slowed down. He remembered what was about to happen. What happens every day after camp--the Dreaded Nap.

"No night-night."

"Yes, Barak, it's time for night-night. Then after night-night maybe we'll go play in the sprinkler."

"No night-night."

"Yes, night-night."

"No night-night now. Night-night tomorrow."

First day back at work

Well, it is, but not really. I'm still in my two-week work-at-home grace period. Tomorrow I have to go in for a few hours, which will be my first real period without Iyyar. I did go to Target with a friend last weekend, leaving him with MHH and a bottle, but that was just a trial run to make sure he would actually take the bottle. It was only an hour and a half, and this is likely to be at least four hours if not more.

I got SO MUCH WORK done this morning. No one stopped by my desk to schmooze. I could pump right at my computer while reading through things I needed to look at, without wasting half an hour in the lactation room. No going down to the cafeteria to look futilely for something kosher to eat that isn't junk. I just worked while Iyyar kicked on the blanket on the floor, and then I nursed him and handed him off to MHH, who put him down for a nap (after loading the dishwasher. Honestly, if we'd never so much as washed a dish in that thing it would still be worth what we paid for for it. It is the best baby-soother ever.)

Right now both Iyyar and Barak are napping, and when they wake up we (MHH and I) are planning on a Very Exciting Family Outing, involving taking them on the bus to go to Whole Foods. The destination is not the exciting part--what is exciting is the bus, which Barak does not remember he once took every day under major protest. These days, when he sees one he points and exclaims, "Bus! Bus fast! Bus zoom!" So we're all going to zoom to Whole Foods and get, I don't know, some organic butter or something.

And as you may have noticed I've been playing with my template and the profile and stuff. No real reason, just time for a change.

Irritable

Iyyar is not a colicky baby. Barak was not a colicky baby. But both of them, like all babies, cry when they're tired or overstimulated. I took Barak to one wedding and that was it--a night of hysterical crying taught me not to do it again. Iyyar can handle shul if it isn't too crowded or noisy, but I wouldn't try taking him to, say, a bar mitzvah unless he was already asleep in the sling.

This afternoon I took him to an afternoon open house that some friends had for their son and daughter-in-law, here for a few weeks from Israel with a new baby. Iyyar slept on the walk there, and then woke up feeling hungry. So he cried, and I went upstairs to a bedroom and fed him. He was still out of sorts, and when I went downstairs to a small living room full of too many people eating and talking, it didn't go over well. He wanted a nice quiet place to sit on Imma's lap, and although he did spent a few minutes quietly in the sling staring intently at the goings-on, he had clearly had enough very shortly. So he started to cry. I should have just turned around and left, but I was waiting for MHH to come with Barak and I didn't want to miss them.

Why, why, why, do people do such totally unhelpful things when someone has a crying baby in public? Like, you know, getting in the baby's face to ASK THE BABY WHY HE'S CRYING. Or informing the mother that "he's not a happy baby, is he?" Why, my goodness, he isn't, and thank YOU so much for making it worse.

When I visited my grandmother with Barak, aged then six months, he had been on a really good schedule that of course got blown to pieces by the trip. He would nap every morning on the bus out to my grandmother's (she is in a nursing home and I stayed in a hotel that was 15 minutes by car, 45 by bus) but then, two hours into the visit, would get tired. And he'd start to kvetch gently, and I'd nurse him, and he'd kvetch a little more on his way to being asleep when some little old lady would get in his face and shout, "WHY ARE YOU CRYING! STOP CRYING! IT'S NOT GOOD TO CRY! HERE, HAVE THIS CANDY!" Which would, of course, make him wake up and cry. Oh, and don't even get me started on the Snugli. Barak loved the Snugli. He'd either watch the world happily or go right to sleep. But every little old Hungarian lady had to cluck disapprovingly and inform me that he was either a) definitely hungry, b) certainly shivering, or c) undoubtedly not getting any air (even though his entire face was nakedly exposed to the elements). After a few days of this, I crossed the street whenever an old lady approached and informed my grandmother grimly that I planned to attach a sign to the Snugli stating, in Hungarian of course, "He's not hungry, he's not shivering, and yes, he can breathe in there!"

Grr.

And while I'm on the subject...

Oh, never mind. I just don't feel like ranting any more.

Stupid people annoy me. Let's just leave it there.

(But I will put in a sentence, on the other side of my annoyance, about my neighbor who still seems to be allowing her barely-three-year-old daughter to play up and down the sidewalk ALONE. Even though we live on a street with, you know, cars, and there have been several attempted abductions in our area in the past year. Now THAT, my friends, is stupid.)

Tragedy

There's no easy way to say it, so I'm just going to come out and say it:

This is what I get for gloating too much.

I killed my Bosch.

I didn't mean to. It wasn't another, er, stove incident. I used a recipe that worked last week, involving five pounds of whole wheat flour. But I was baking with Barak. I wasn't paying attention, and didn't put in the cup of oil. And the dough was just a little too stiff. Frankly, I was asking the Bosch to mix concrete. And it tried. It tried so hard, in fact, that it keeled over and died.

I thought that there was supposed to be some safety mechanism to prevent it from burning out its own motor, but if there is it didn't work. I was left kneading ten pounds of concrete by hand, and calling the dealer to cry.

To their credit, they are sending me a new base today, and a mailing label to ship the dead one back postpaid. It doesn't help my current challah crisis, but it's better than $319 worth of nonfunctioning mixer.

And I also bought the bigger stainless steel bread bowl. And was admonished to add the flour gradually next time, instead of dumping it all in, even though the sheet that came with the mixer SPECIFICALLY SAID you could do this.

Oh well.

Off to bake cookies. Mixed with my old hand mixer. Good shabbos, everyone.

Possibly the strangest thing I have ever seen

Here.

The bounty of the Bosch

Because it's been too long since I posted a picture... here's one of a big glob of challah dough. Enough for l'hafrish challah and then some.

Shanna, you're still invited for Shabbos... I'll even roast garlic for you.

Cheese doodles and immortal words

It was really hot today, but not as horrifically hot as it's been, so after Barak woke up from his nap I proposed that we go outside to sprinkle. He thought that this was a good idea, but first wanted cheese doodles. Fine, I said. Let's make cheese doodles.

Doodles, by the way, are noodles, but Hungarian noodles. For me, Hungarian noodles, paired preferably with finely grated cheese and, um, a very traditionally Hungarian Diet Coke, are the ultimate comfort food. Barak will probably feel the same way about them when he grows up (I hope minus the Diet Coke part). The formula is one cup of unbleached flour to one egg to one teaspoon of salt to 1/3 cup of milk; if you want to make them parve, use two eggs and enough water to make the dough soft. Then you put a noodlemaker, which is a sheet of metal with half-inch holes punched in it, over a pot of boiling water, and you use a bench knife to scrape the dough through the holes into the water. The result are soft, chewy noodles of many many shapes, Very Entrancing to small children (and to me).

So I made Barak his doodles, and informed him that he was about to have a Fine Restaurant Experience as I grated kashkaval (sharp goat's cheese) directly onto them. He thought that this rocked, and informed me periodically that his doodles were SO GOOD!

Once we were done, Barak got me his dinosaur hat and his shoes, and I put Iyyar in the sling, and we went out to, ahem, water the lawn. I let Barak water by spraying everywhere with the sprinkler; I stayed out of range. Iyyar fell asleep, Barak was having a riotously good time, and just as Iyyar started to feel a bit peckish, MHH came home. I unburdened him of his gemaras and went inside. About fifteen minutes later, I heard someone ring the back doorbell. It was Shimon, my friend and neighbor's second-oldest son. He's five, and was very, very wet. "Can I use your bathroom?" he asked. "Sure," I said, surmising, correctly, that he had happened upon the sprinkler festivities (they don't have a yard) and joined in. His mother, Chana, is my best friend in town, and Barak and I are over there a lot. Her kids like Barak and my husband, who, because he's a rebbe in one of the schools here, they call Rabbi H.

I decided I wanted to see this and put Iyyar back in the sling and got up to go out. "Should I go watch?" I asked, as he struggled to get his feet back into the sopping wet sneakers that he had (impressively) taken off on the porch without being asked to do so.

"Yeah!" he said enthusiastically. "Rabbi H is as wet as my pants!"

Three months

So, my boss just called. "We bought you three months," she said. I get two weeks to work at home to sort out my childcare, and then three months of three days in the office, two at home. The three days in are five-hour days, so that means three days of 6.5 hours away from Iyyar and Barak. And somewhere in the week, I have to find another 7.5 hours of quiet time to work, but that's going to have to be in the evenings.

It's not the perfect resolution I hoped for--the "your position is now a permanent telecommuting position"--but it's a whole lot better than it could have been. I'm very grateful.

The nursage chronicles, from Barak's point of view

Iyyar did not want to nap this morning. He fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep, woke up, cried, nursed, etc., etc. He finally conked out at 12:30, half an hour before I had to go get Barak. So I stealthily picked him up and slipped him into the Snugli. I wasn't stealthy enough; he woke right up, and of course, despite having nursed only about an hour and a half earlier was STARVING. I didn't have time to do anything about it, so we headed out, me pushing an empty stroller for Barak and Iyyar absolutely livid.

It wasn't the most fun walk--you get a lot of looks when you're walking very fast and, apparently, oblivious to the malnourished infant you're carrying. Some are sympathetic. Some are not. I should be less sensitive to this, but, well, I'm pretty sensitive to it. Anyway. We got Barak, who wanted to walk, not go in the stroller, and was promptly informed that Imma was going to start counting. That worked, fortunately--I have no idea what I would have done for a timeout in Morah Esther's backyard. We got home, by which time Iyyar was bright purple and totally, completely hysterical.

I usually put Barak straight down for a nap but today clearly Iyyar's needs trumped his. I slipped Barak a juice box--BIG treat--and sat down with Iyyar. Ahh. Silence. Barak watched all of this from behind his juice.

"Baby crying."

"Yes, he was crying, huh."

"Baby loud."

"He sure was."

Pause.

"Baby nursing."

"Yup, he's nursing now. He's not crying anymore, right?"

"Baby happy!"

The nursage chronicles

Nursing, in case you have never tried it, is not always easy. Before I had kids, I had no clue about this. It never occurred to me while I was pregnant that I might bottle feed. In the hospital, when the nurse asked, "breast or bottle?" I blithely said, "breast." It's natural, right? How hard can it be?

With Barak, it was pretty awful for quite a while. When he was born, he got whisked off to the NICU without ever getting close to the Source of All Good Things; the first time I saw him, he was twelve hours old, lying on his back in a warmer, bright purple, screaming at the top of his obviously healthy lungs, being totally ignored and with a pacifier right next to him, spat out amidst the hysteria. "I hope you don't mind that I gave him a pacifier," the nurse told me, apologetically. "He was just beside himself." Well, yes, so was I, and you don't see ME sucking on a piece of green plastic, do you? Perhaps you might have PICKED HIM UP AND SOOTHED HIM? But I digress...

The internet doesn't need to know the details of my anatomy, but suffice it to say that most women are not shaped like pacifiers and neither am I. So when Barak was introduced to what was supposed to be in his mouth, and it wasn't shaped like green plastic, he had no idea what to do. It smelled good, but he just couldn't get his mouth around it, and he definitely couldn't latch, and he just cried. And cried. And I cried too. And there was the evil evil nurse floating around behind him, intoning "Weight loss... formula... hungry..."

The hospital lactation consultant was worse than useless, and the list of lactation consultants I got at his pediatrician's was composed almost entirely of out-of-service numbers. (I'm not making this up. One of them was supposed to be something like "Gentle Wings Lactation Consultants" or whatever. I called it, and got the voice of a very manly-sounding man on the other end. "Um, is this Gentle Wings Lactation Consultants?" I squeaked. Amidst the sounds of grunting and banging, I heard, "What? No, this is Big Burly Guys Construction and Destruction." "Sorry, wrong number...")

Anyway, I finally did get a hold of a lactation consultant, whose fee nearly made me faint, but it wasn't even close to what I would have spent on formula. She showed me what was wrong, and gave me a little piece of silicone to make me more pacifier-shaped. Barak needed it for five months. Five months of losing it in the middle of the night, needing full light and wakefulness to nurse, sterilizing the thing a million times daily. Yecch. When I finally got around to calling the LC to ask where I could get more, she sounded shocked that I was still using it. "And you're still nursing?" she asked. Um, yeah, obviously, or I wouldn't be needing more. "I've never had a woman make it more than two weeks still needing one. It's just too much of a pain." Tell me about it. And then when Barak finally could latch without it, we got into the yeast infections...

Well, anyway. He did, in the end, nurse for almost 19 months. And I know now that there are some babies who just cannot do it. I couldn't do it. He couldn't do it. I could never have done it without a whole lot of very expensive help. Which makes the current "nurse your baby or else" campaign all the more enraging. But I digress. (I do that a lot, don't I. Well, what can I say, it's my blog, where else can I digress if I feel like it?)

When Iyyar was born, I knew what not to do. He didn't get a pacifier until he was a month old. I made sure to nurse him right away and had the nurses plaster his bassinet with "I'm nursing, NO FORMULA, NO PACIFIERS!" signs. He caught on immediately, and it was all good, although excruciatingly painful for the first couple of weeks. Who knew it would hurt again? Not me. It hurt more than it did the first time. Unfair, unfair...

Now, happily, it doesn't hurt at all, which is good because Iyyar spends a LOT of time nursing. It is his favorite activity at any hour of the day or night and he is, fortunately, very very good at it. He can do it while I'm completely asleep, and as I recently discovered I now don't even need to get him started. I can put him next to me in bed and wake up a few hours later to find him still happily at it. I have to assume that he did stop, sleep, and start again, but who knows? All I know is that unlike Barak, who at this age was in something like the fifth percentile for weight, Iyyar is cruising past the fiftieth.

It's funny to watch him nurse. This morning, he was obviously done eating but not done with the comfort part of it; he was still latched on but his eyes, peering over the top, were darting around with interest, busily taking in everything going on in the kitchen. I let him do that for a little while, then, needing to get Barak's bag ready for camp, took him off. Squawk of outrage: "EXCUSE ME! Can't you see I was USING that!" Sorry...

Nursing is about so much more than food and antibodies. For me, it's knowing that there is one thing that nobody but me can do for him. It's making me sit down and pay attention, making me ignore the laundry and dinner and the million other things that I need to be doing. For him, it's love, comfort, and All Things Imma. When you watch him nurse you can just hear him humming, "mmm, so good, so good, so goooood." It's absolutely my favorite, most satisfying part of mothering him. It's doing the right thing and making both of us happy.

He's asleep now, in his favorite spot next to the dishwasher, which is currently sterilizing pump parts. I don't know yet what will be so far as work, but I can't wait until I do to get started building a freezer stash if I'm going to need one. So I'm pumping, which I did for Barak. And today I went out and bought bottles. It's the next best thing. I know that. He'll still nurse all he wants 148 hours a week, and he won't ever get formula if I can help it.

But it won't be the same.

Last Sunday; Or, How We Went Out for Bagels and Ended Up Buying a Couch and a Car

So, last week MHH was in New York. A few weeks before he went, I put out a piteous plea for visitors, which was doughtily answered by Deb and her daughter Isabelle. They came by train, and were scheduled to arrive a bit before lunch last Sunday (a week ago now). MHH's flight was at around 10, and he had to leave for the airport at 7. Having the morning free (well, sort of--I hadn't cleaned the kitchen, gotten the guest room ready, washed the new sheets intended for guest room beds, or anything else, but I wasn't going to get any of that done with Barak and Iyyar to take care of anyway) I decided it was a good morning to go for bagels. I also had to tovel the parts to my new Bosch. So I piled Barak in the stroller and Iyyar in the sling, and off we went.

Halfway there, Iyyar realized that he hadn't nursed in 22 minutes and was therefore STARVING; we stopped off in the JCC bathroom for a nursing break. Then we went to the keilim mikva and toveled everything, including the new milchig chef's knife, which of course I dropped to the bottom of the mikva. Ever tried to retrieve a very deadly knife from the bottom of a keilim mikva with a little baby strapped to your front? No, I thought not. Barak, who had not yet had breakfast, tried very hard to be patient with all of this, but it was well past 8 and he was getting hungry. By the time we got to the bagel store, it was nearly nine. And what did I see in the parking lot of the shul across the street from the bagel place but--a rummage sale. With two couches visibly for sale.

A digression: my friend Cecilia says that you know you are an adult when you live in more than one room, do your laundry without quarters, have your address printed on your checks and own furniture you neither inherited nor assembled yourself. In that last category, we have very little; I don't think it makes a lot of sense to spent a lot of money on furniture when we have kids and a cat to destroy it and are hoping to make aliyah, which will require ditching most of it anyway.

Our living room, as of last Sunday, had, in the way of furniture, many many bookshelves, some kitchen chairs, and one small couch that sits two uncomfortably and sags under the weight of anyone heavier than Barak. I have been scoping for a new couch for quite some time. I did not want to spend much money on it (see above) but did want something clean, not smelly, and comfy. Clearly, I had to check out the rummage sale.

So, within feet of our destination, I asked Barak to be just a little more patient, and went over to the parking lot. They had couches. They had two. They were both nice. I found someone who was working the sale, told her I wanted one of them and agreed on a price ($75). Just then, Iyyar woke up AGAIN and demanded nursage AGAIN, IMMEDIATELY. So we went inside and nursed, and soothed the savage baby, and came back out, at which point there was someone else agreeing with a different person on a different price for that very couch. Oops. He looked rather distraught when this was made clear, and I looked at couch #2 and decided it was okay, so I let him have couch #1 and took couch #2.

Of course, not having intended to buy a couch, I had no checkbook and no idea how to get it home. But I guess I looked trustworthy, so I was told to leave my name and phone number and get it out of the shul by Shabbos. And then, on the way out, I saw the toy section, and one of those Little Tikes cars that Barak loves so much at other people's houses, and it was five dollars, so we bought that too, and a new-in-the-box toy jigsaw for good measure. I gave Barak the saw, and we went and had our bagels, finally, and Iyyar slept through the whole thing so I actually got to eat.

Getting the couch home was too much of a saga to go through here, but it made its way into our living room 45 minutes before Shabbos, and Barak, who did not see the living room with couch until Shabbos morning, greeted the discovery with, "Wow! Couch!" and then, "Wow! CAR!!"

It all looks much more furnished and homey now. I mean, what's a living room without a car parked in it?

Eleven

On Monday, baby Iyyar will be eleven weeks old. He's sleeping more and crying less (really, Deb, he is); he's just started smiling in response to a smile, though only when he's in the mood. He's outgrown all of his newborn stretchies. He falls asleep nursing and stays asleep, some of the time; put him in the bouncy seat in front of a running dishwasher and that's usually good for a whole 5-lb bag of flour's worth of challah. Put him in the Snugli and he'll sleep for a while, but only until he wakes up and realizes that his nose is between the places his mouth should be. He's warm and cuddly. He smells good. I love him an awful lot.

Eleven weeks is the point where you usually stop counting in weeks and start counting months. But I'm acutely aware of the number of weeks, because my FMLA maternity leave is 12 weeks long. I've got one week left. And the request that my boss put in for me back in December, to become a permanent telecommuter, has, it appears, just been denied. Meaning that I'm expected back to work, a week from Monday, for 22.5 hours a week--which, with commute, makes 30 hours a week away from Barak and Iyyar. And there is no question in my mind that 30 hours a week is just. Too. Much. Not to mention the fact that my babysitter, who admittedly rocks, can only do 20 hours a week. My boss is able to give me a few weeks' grace to get that sorted out, but that's not going to be good enough. I'm still going to have to leave a tiny baby, every day, for far too long.

So, now what? Could I quit? Well, I could, but that would leave us without health insurance. (The money I take home, after I pay for childcare, is helpful, but not enough to be a major consideration. Basically, I work for insurance and the retirement benefits.) And as MHH pointed out when I went tearily off to work in the first place, when Barak was 7 months old and in a really good daycare two blocks from work, making sure that your kids have health insurance is also part of being a good mother. I could stand it then, because he was so close that the hours of being apart were really only the 4.5 hours I worked; and because he was a bit older, and already so independent. But I can't afford to have both of them in that daycare--it would cost far more than I earn. I'd have to leave them both with a sitter, here. It would mean pumping two bottles a day, and between keeping everyone clothed and fed, and working, and pumping, and maybe sleeping--what would happen to my mothering?

If we paid Cobra, and lived off MHH's salary alone, we could pay our mortgage and eat, and probably still buy the kids shoes. But that would be it. There would be nothing for any unexpected expenses, we would not be saving for retirement, and the ever-looming yeshiva tuition bills would not go away (although I have to assume we'd be eligible for more in scholarships.) We could manage for a while, but not forever; I am not willing to be that poor at this stage of our lives, not with no safety net of savings or family help. I'd have to go back to work eventually, and I'd have lost what is almost undoubtedly the best part-time job on public transport anywhere in the area. I mean, how many people hire part-time speechwriters and give them full benefits and a totally flexible schedule? And supply them helpfully with very intelligent and understanding bosses with senses of humor? Not many. I'm very, very fortunate to have the job I have, and I know it.

But I also know I can't handle it right now. And I told my boss this. "I could tell you I could do it, and I could show up on Monday and try to do it, but I can't. I'd be hiding out in the lactation room weeping into my Medela. I'd be useless." "You'd probably also get pretty tiresome to the other lactating mothers," she agreed. So, we hatched a Plan B, which is that I quit, she hires me back as a freelancer (during which time I agree to behave as though I were still on staff so far as my availability) and agrees to hire me back to staff in three months (at which time I will try to get approved to at least work a third of my hours from home).

She's going to go to her boss with this and call me back next week. There are a lot of questions, like, will I get hired back at the same salary? Will she write me a job offer before I leave, so I can have it on paper? How is all of this going to work with my longevity and the rest of it?

And most important, will he say yes?

Not much to report

I'm looking out my back window at a garbage truck, thinking what I think whenever I see a garbage truck or fire truck or large vehicle of any description without Barak around: "Oh, Barak would LOVE that!" Yesterday on the way home from "camp" we passed a cherrypicker-cum-forklift that was lifting bags of cement onto the top of a building under construction. We stopped to watch, and the guy directing the cherrypicker, thinking we wanted to get by, waved us past. "No, we're just looking," I called over the din. "He loves trucks." "Don't they all!" he yelled back genially. I guess mine was not the first two-year-old to gape at his truck.

MHH has been in New York since Sunday, coming back tomorrow. We could have gone, but I didn't think it would be any easier than staying home by ourselves, and although we miss him I'm glad we didn't go. Instead we had a couple of friends come here to visit, and that's been a lot more fun. Barak, however, has had a cold and an ear infection, and with Abba's mysterious absence on top of that has not exactly been sweet and cheerful this week. And Iyyar has still been having a lot of tummyaches, so it's been, shall we say, a high-volume household for the last few days. And I'm a little on the sleep-deprived side, to put it mildly. But as I keep reminding myself, I had a quiet house once and I'll have one again someday, and I should enjoy the noise while I have it.

The volume has also been added to in a most satisfactory way by the arrival of my lovely new mixer. It turned up at 2 pm on a Friday and yes, I had a five-pound bag of flour dumped in it within the hour, and warm challah ready by candlelighting. (I read the manual online before it arrived so as to be able to get right down to business. What, me obsessive?) I've already done three enormous batches of dough, one white and two whole-wheat, and only stopped when I ran out of both flour and yeast. More yeast came in the mail today, and my friends and I walked the two miles to the grocery store that sells the flour I like to get more of that, so I'm tempted to fire the mixer up again during naptime this afternoon. But there are six loaves in the freezer, and I should probably do some of the other high-priority household tasks (you know, like changing the sheets Barak pooped all over last night) first. Probably.

Sleep

When you spend a lot of hours in the dark holding and nursing a baby, you think up a lot of blog posts that never actually make it onto the blog. Last night, I was thinking (not surprisingly) about sleep, and getting babies to sleep. With Barak, it was simple: you pick me up, I sleep; you put me down, I stop. With Iyyar, it is about the same, although if you swaddle Iyyar tightly (we call it a baby burrito around here) and put him in the bouncy seat, preferably in front of the dishwasher, you can get some good naps out of that. At night, he will generally sleep in the cosleeper, but again only if swaddled. However, this takes some sneakiness on my part.

What Iyyar really would prefer would be sleeping with me, ideally on me, all night. While I am okay with ending the night with him in the bed, the truth is that I don't sleep as well when he's in the bed--I worry that he'll roll into the mattress, or up against my clothes, or something like that. So I cuddle him to sleep, either lying on the bed with him or in the glider rocker, and stealthily transfer him into the cosleeper.

Sometimes this works. Sometimes he just carries on sleeping until he gets hungry. More often, though, he senses that something is not right and starts to wiggle. Then he coughs. Then he wakes up properly and begins to howl with all the righteous indignation of someone who shelled out for a first-class ticket, went to sleep happily in a plush reclining seat, and woke up to find himself ignominiously relocated to a ratty suitcase in the baggage car. "Excuse ME! I did NOT agree to this. I believe I agreed to go to sleep on Imma's delightfully squishy postpartum tummy, NOT on this rock-hard AAP-approved foam rubber travesty of a--a--what do you call it again? A mattress? Well I call it FEH!"

Generally though if he is swaddled it is okay, since he tends not to feel the difference abruptly enough to wake him up. Last night, because it is warm and I don't like the idea of having the central AC on just so that I can wrap a baby in three layers of blanket, I tried to get him to go to sleep unswaddled. I reasoned that I should try to get him to go to sleep next to me, not on me, so that the transition wouldn't be as glaring. I lay down. I laid him down. I closed my eyes. He was about three inches away. I heard snuffling. And shuffling. And wiggling. And scootching. Then I felt warm little puffs of air on my cheek. Then I felt the rustle of little eyelashes on my nose. Then I heard a tiny heave and a moment later had Iyyar's face plastered completely against mine. And then I heard a happy little sigh, and a moment later, snores.

Iyyar 1, Imma 0. But I'm not a sore loser. In fact I kind of like it when he wins.

And the winner is...

This mixer. I got the basic model with the plastic bowl and no blender--I can always get more parts later if I feel I need them.

It's supposed to arrive on Friday. I decided to be prepared, and today went to Target and bought 6 new parve loaf pans, and even toveled them on the way home.

Think FedEx will get in here in time for me to figure it out and make challah for Shabbos?

Sefiras ha'Tinok

Both my kids were born during the omer, which lent itself very well to counting baby sefira. As in, Today is fifteen days, which is two weeks and one day of the baby. Etc.

The omer is over, and he's more than seven weeks old--nine weeks yesterday, in fact. Meaning that I have less than three weeks until I have to go back to work. Something about which I am in complete, total denial. Work? What work? I'm a stay at home mother, I am.

Julia posted a week or two ago about working versus staying at home. I have so much to say about this it'll have to wait. Right now, though, I'm trying to pretend that this will go on forever--that Barak will spend the morning at playgroup while I snuggle the baby and run errands with him in the sling, that they'll both nap at more or less the same time while I make dinner, that we'll sit on the floor reading books and doing puzzles until MHH comes home at suppertime.

Iyyar is crying a little less and playing a little more. He's just beginning to show the first glimmers of smiling back at me when I smile at him, but mostly just smiles at windows and lamps and that kind of thing. He likes napping in the bouncy seat, especially when I put it next to the dishwasher--I guess all the swishing sounds familiar. (That's where he is right now, in fact.) He loves being held and spends most of his time either on me or in the sling or snugli. And he loves baths and clean diapers--unlike Barak, who hated water until he was at least one and still deeply resents the indignity of diaper changes, Iyyar is visibly delighted by being clean. He starts kvetching as soon as his diaper is wet, but once it's off--ahhh.

The last few posts have been very Barak-centric, so just thought I'd let you know that Iyyar continues to be sweet and cuddly. And has just outgrown his last newborn stretchie. Milestones...

Barak counts

I've been very good for a long time, but today I cracked. I made chocolate chip cookies. In my defense, I only ate four, and the rest have left the house. And I did get a good blog post out of it. To wit:

I'm scooping cookie dough and putting it on the cookie sheet. Barak is watching, and helping me count scoops. However, he's fixating on the numer seven, so counting goes like this:

"One..."

"Seven!"

"Two..."

"Seven!"

"Three..."

"Seven!"

"Four..."

"Seven!"

"Five..."

"Seven!"

"Six..."

"Seven!"

"Right! Seven! Seven cookies! What comes after seven?"

"Eat it!"

More mix!

Barak is a lot of fun to bake with. Last week we made challah and this afternoon we made whole-wheat muffins. I really do let him mix--I put the (stainless steel) mixing bowl on his high chair tray, hand him the measured ingredients (we steer clear of things needing raw eggs, or I add those last), and let him have fun. He's surprisingly good at not spilling, and today, when I handed him half a cup of raisins to add to the muffin batter, even refrained from stuffing them all in his mouth.

"Eat it?" he inquired politely.

"Eat these, " I told him, giving him a few on the side of the bowl. "The ones in the cup are for the muffins. You'll eat those later."

"Eat later," he agreed, downing the ones I gave him--but leaving the ones in the bowl alone.

When we made the challah, it was what my mother would term an "experiment in better cooking"--meaning, no recipe, no advance planning, seat-of-your-skirt cooking. I started Barak off with the basics of flour, water, yeast, and salt, and then he started requesting additions.

"More mix!"

"Okay, do you want more flour?"

"No! More mix!"

"Do you want to put in something else?"

"Yeah!"

"Okay, what should we put in?"

"Sugar?"

Sure, why not, here's a spoonful. Mix mix mix. "Butter?" Well, how about olive oil? That'll do nicely. Mix mix mix. And so on, through much of the kitchen cupboards. I did draw the line at the sprinkles, although a friend of mine says that that's fun for Purim.

The challah was surprisingly good, and Barak has a raisin muffin packed with his lunch tomorrow. Oh, and on the mixer front--does anyone have a Bosch? I just discovered that there is an option for a much larger stainless steel bowl with dough hook, and you can get the regular (plastic) bowl assembly separately--so I could use the big steel one for challah and parve stuff and the smaller one for milchigs. But I've never seen a Bosch mixer and I don't know anyone who has one, so if you have one and love/hate/are indifferent to it, please let me know.

One step back

Barak is asleep. In a diaper.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you will know that Barak is one of the most constitutionally sleep-resistent children ever born. He came that way and has not changed. Sleep is the enemy. It is the devil. It must be fought at all costs.

To be fair, this trait is clearly genetic. MHH hates going to sleep and often falls asleep on the couch over a book, moments after refusing to go to bed on the grounds that he wants to do one more pasuk or isn't tired or whatever. His classic position is slumped on the couch, book on chest, two dirty socks on floor next to bare feet. When his father came to visit last Rosh Hashanah, I found both of them sitting next to each other on the couch, both asleep, both with books on their chests, with two pairs of dirty socks on the floor next to two sets of bare feet. When Barak goes to bed, he takes a book into his crib, and if I am sitting in there with him I see him nod off over a copy of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" or "Olivia." The only reason he doesn't have the dirty socks there is that I take them off before I put him to bed. It's only a matter of time.

Until we came back from Israel, though, he'd been doing pretty well. We had a good bedtime routine, and most nights he went to sleep with a minimum of crying. It took about an hour, maybe, to get him to sleep. When we came back from Israel, though, it was all over--routine disrupted, sleep but a distant memory. And I was pregnant, and then I got put on bedrest, and then I had Iyyar, and... anyway, as of two weeks ago we were at the point where bedtime frequently involved up to three hours of screaming. Seriously. And he woke up during the night a bunch of times, too. Have I mentioned that Iyyar's tummy troubles now have him officially in the "colicky baby" category? Three hours of screaming at least three days a week?

And then Barak figured out that he could cry potty, thereby turning bedtime into an extended bedtime story cum potty trip that only ended when he--get this--actually did anything on the toilet. How much of a disincentive is that?

And the one naptime where, after several false alarms, I actually ignored "Imma! Potty!"--oh, do I even need to say what happened?

So, last Shabbos we had my DSIL and company here. They arrived at 10 pm on Thursday and Barak was--you guessed it--on the potty, reading "Cars and Trucks and Things that Go," so tired that he actually fell off ("Imma! Potty fall!") but then insisted on getting back on ("Potty! Pish potty!") And my DSIL, wise woman with twice as many kids as I have, delicately suggested that perhaps a diaper was in order. So the next morning, I asked Barak if he wanted to wear a diaper. He did, and I put one on him, and put the rugs back where they were.

This is not to say that he does not still make potty trips. He does--the lure of ice cream and chocolate chips is still enough of an incentive. And I do think he'll get there eventually. But right now, my desire to have us all sleep trumps my desire to have him out of diapers. Handily.

Purchase decisions

I think I can fairly say that I am pretty careful about money. I'm not as thrifty as I might be, not by a long shot, but I think I'm pretty good. I have never carried a credit card balance. We pay cash for almost everything and had no debt when we bought our home. B"H, we put extra money toward mortgage principal every month. We put significant chunks of our paychecks into retirement accounts. We don't have cable TV or go to movies or restaurants other than the pizza and bagel shops. Almost all our furniture is inherited or bought used, almost everything we wear is bought in the twice-yearly LL Bean clearance (if it was never in style, it can't go out of style, and it wears forever), and I will happily make multiple trips on foot to the drugstore to buy dozens of packages of diapers if I can save a few bucks on each. And almost all of Barak's books and toys are either gifts or from yard sales; most of his clothes are either from Target or Value City (with the exception of the things I made or got at the LL Bean clearance).

We both have our fiscal weaknesses. MHH likes to buy seforim, and since I know they make him happy I rarely say no. I even bought him a whole Chumash Malbim for his birthday. I like to knit, and I still buy yarn even though it would take me a decade to knit everything I already have. And I buy diet coke by the single can, only one can at a time, which is phenomenally stupid given that I drink a can every day, but when I keep it in the house I go through it like water so I figure that the extra fifty cents is a reasonable investment in my health.

Anyway, the point being that the unjustifiable purchase of kitchen toys is an extremely rare event around here.

But I'm about to buy a stand mixer.

I've wanted a stand mixer for over half my life--since I started baking bread in a serious way in junior high school. (Oy. Closer to two-thirds of my life.) Never could afford one. I never felt that I could justify the expense, since there have always been (and will always be) more pressing expenses.

Right now, my bread machine is out of commission, and since it is flaking Teflon out of the bread pan I don't want to use it anyway. The bakery is good, but does not sell whole wheat challah, which is what MHH likes. I simply do not have the time to knead all our bread by hand. And right now, Mr. Gassy Boy is sleeping happily, because all I ate all day was, well, bread and half a hot dog and some cheese (not all at the same time.) I think I'm going to be eating a lot of bread in the weeks ahead. And I'd prefer it had at least some nutritional content.

So, you foodies or at least bakers out there--what do you recommend? There's that killer Viking mixer, which mixes a whole five-pound bag of whole wheat flour at a shot. There's the Bosch, but that plastic bowl--urgh. And of course there's the rainbow of KitchenAids, but I hear that the motor doesn't stand up to major challah-baking.

If I can buy it somewhere I don't have to pay tax, all the better; I'll definitely have to pay shipping, since a stand mixer is not exactly a stroller-basket item.

Thoughts?

First day of camp

I really shouldn't be wasting precious naptime this way, but...

Barak started camp today. By "camp," we mean camp in the frum sense of a bunch of two-year-olds in someone's basement and backyard. It's four hours a day for six weeks, and unbelievably cheap, and run by the same person who will be doing his in-home preschool in the fall. I don't need care for Barak for the next six weeks--I'm home for the next four and MHH is here for the two after that--but I thought he'd enjoy it, and frankly I need more sleep than I'm getting, so I enrolled him.

When we went out this morning, he knew something was up, and didn't seem at all worried--just excited. I told him we were going to Morah Esther's, and there were going to be kinderlach and toys, and this sounded good to him. He actually ran ahead of me down the path to the house where he'd never been before, and as we walked in he stopped in awe at the wonders laid out before him--toys and ooh, trucks! He clung to my leg at the door for all of nine seconds before pointing at the Little Tikes firetruck and asking me, "Imma? Firetruck fast?" and plunging forth. He didn't even blink when I left, impelled by the earsplitting screams of starvation from his baby brother who hadn't eaten in THIRTY-NINE MINUTES!

(Ways in which my kids are unlike anyone else's kids: Barak is unbothered by bodily injury and Iyyar is the loudest baby ever. In a room of twelve Orthodox mothers, who as you may imagine are not easily perturbed by children's spills or babies' cries, my kids had them all gasping. Barak plunged off of something--I didn't see it--and returned instantly to playing, ignoring the three nearby mothers with their hands out to deliver him to me; Iyyar's wails of misery drew looks of sympathy and consternation from mothers and children, when all I heard was his normal-volume kvetching. It's just that for him, normal volume is about 200 decibels.)

So, we came home, and I took care of Iyyar and cleaned up the house a little and still managed not to get a nap, and then we went back to get him at one. When I got there, he was still in the firetruck, though I was assured that he had gotten out in the meantime. Morah Esther said, "He cried for you a little here and there, but then he was on to the next thing." I have to admit that I was secretly pleased, just a little--it's good to have an independent kid but Barak is so independent and so fearless that it's nice to know that he missed me.

I went over and said "Hi, Barak! Did you have fun?" and he stopped and this look of delight and relief went over his face, and he breathed, "Imma!" And then ran over to Morah Esther, and pointed at me, and said, "Imma!" As if to say, that's who I've been asking for all morning! Next time, you'll know who I'm talking about and go get her, right?

I asked him if he wanted to go home, and he said no. I told him we'd be back tomorrow, and then he said, "Home?" And home we went.

They weren't kidding.

Our upstairs neighbors moved out a couple of months ago and sold their apartment to a family that they said were Nigerian. When the new family moved in, I got the impression that they were Nigerian the way MHH is Polish, Barak and Iyyar are Hungarian, and much of New York is Irish. The kids looked and sounded generically African-American to me. I admit it--I didn't think any of them were actually from Africa.

Until I saw their teenage son carry a refrigerator up our outside back steps.

On his head.

Hinei ma tov...

... to have both your kids nap for two hours. The same two hours.

I cleaned the kitchen, picked up our bedroom, and folded mountains of laundry, including piles and piles of MHH's undershirts. When I'm nursing I have a tendency to mooch off his supply--there is nothing softer in the early days of pain and soreness than ancient men's undershirts. Next to lanolin, it's the most helpful thing. While folding shirts this afternoon, I had abundant evidence of my fondness for both lanolin and MHH's shirts.

I wonder how many other men are out there wearing undershirts with twin lanolin stains suspiciously located in front?

Put your ballots here

MHH is one of the more chronically late people you will ever encounter. I, on the other hand, am one of the more chronically punctual. (The irony here is that he's yekkish and I'm Hungarian, but we'll leave that alone.) It drives me nuts that he's late all the time. And I admit it. I nudge.

Today, for example, Barak, Iyyar and I were headed out for a little erranding at 5:30. MHH announced his intention to accomplish several tasks and then make the 6:05 minyan. I privately thought this highly unlikely.

"I'll make a deal with you," I said. "If you are on time for the 6:05 minyan, I'll wash the fleishig dishes that are still sitting in the kitchen from shabbos. Including the cholent pot."

MHH quite clearly thought this a stroke of most excellent good fortune. "Seriously?"

"Yup," I said. "But you have to be there on time. Like for when they klop. You have to say ashrei when everybody else says ashrei."

MHH agreed to this and we went out separate ways. At 6:02 my phone rang.

"I was six minutes early!" he said.

"But?" I said.

"It's Yom Kippur Katan. Mincha started twenty minutes ago. And they're not done yet."

So, we leave this to you. I hold that the deal was he had to be there for ashrei. He holds that he just had to be on time for the 6:05, and cannot be held accountable for the fact that the 6:05 was twenty-five minutes early.

The cholent pot is pretty crusty and gross. Who washes it, me or MHH?

Votes to be tallied at 11 pm tonight. I don't really want to leave it on the counter till tomorrow.

We thank you in advance for your sense of civic responsibility in this matter.

The potty chronicles, and everything else

I should probably do this post as a list, but I think I'm too tired to count, which is probably why I'm blogging instead of knitting, so I'll just do it as a sort of stream-of-consciousness post instead. You all with me on this one? Good good.

So, day what is it? Fourteen? of Diaper-Free Barak went pretty well. Two misses of the not-as-serious variety, both in his crib. Nothing on the floor. Friday was also great. Shabbos we're not even going to talk about. Barak is very clear on all the concepts and is gradually getting the idea that pooping is a pretty easy way to get ice cream. He has also, unfortunately, fully grasped the idea that if he wants to get out of his crib, calling "Abba! Potty!" is a spectacularly effective method. Might I add that to date, NONE of these late-night potty excursions has resulted in anything but parental sleep deprivation? No, that's probably not necessary.

Shabbos evening was a little bit stressful, in the way that doughnuts are a little bit fattening and Big Macs are a little bit treif. I won't get into details, except to present to you the observation that arguing with mikva ladies is like unto arguing with airline security. I will leave that one right there, thank you.

Iyyar is nursing apace. Unlike Barak at this age, he is very happy in the sling and will cheerily watch the world from his perch. However, the good sleep is but a memory, because he's currently one of the gassiest babies on earth. It's so sad--he'll be happily looking around and then all of a sudden his face will crumple, his mouth will open wide and he will start to shriek at an phenomenal volume that seems literally to split the eardrums and instantly renders any conversation completely out of the question. Despite the magical elixir, which usually solves these problems with impressive speed, tonight he just screamed and screamed, while Barak took two hours to go to sleep and... yeah, well. B"H we have two kids with good lungs.

This week MHH is doing a full-day, all-week teacher training program that will have me home with a gassy 7-week-old and a toilet-training 2-year-old all on my own from 6 am (it's that minyan thing) till 6 pm. Oof. If it weren't for the toilet training (what was I thinking? what what what? oh, I know what I was thinking, but why was I thinking it?) it would be a lot easier. But as it is... umm. What I want to know is how women with many more kids than I have keep tidy houses, cook three meals a day, and have everyone clean and fed more or less all the time. Last night as we were going to bed I asked MHH what he'd given Barak for dinner (I'd been busy with the baby). He said, I thought you gave him dinner. I hadn't. We reviewed the evening and realized that the last thing he'd had to eat before bedtime was--you guessed it--ice cream, reward for pooping in the potty.

Sigh.

And I just heard a little voice calling, "Imma... Imma... potty..."

It's 9:32.

Where were we?

Oh yes. He's still in there listening to volume II of Torah Island. Has anyone else noticed the completely circular logic of the Happiness Song, or the fact that Uncle Moishy NEVER EXPLAINS the meaning of his dream, or the complete randomness of most of the songs? I mean, what does Succos have to do with how great it is to keep kosher? I ask you.

Well, at least I did cook dinner tonight, and was domestically admirable in that between me and MHH, we took three trips to the recently-bought-out drugstore that sells the store brand of diapers I like, since they are now labeled with the defunct store name and therefore half price. We now have about 500 diapers in sizes 2 and 3 stocked up for Iyyar's future diaper needs, heading to the storage space in the basement, which I am absolutely itching to organize but who am I kidding, when am I going to have the time? I haven't even written my thank-you notes yet. Oh, and we also got another industrial-sized vat of laundry detergent, because, well, we go through a lot of that these days.

[stares blearily at wall behind computer screen]

So, what do I do now? Do I wash the dishes from dinner, take a shower, or knit a little on my sock? Fold another load of laundry? I can't go to bed, because MHH is at minyan and I can never fall asleep till he gets home so that's pointless.

Barak is in his crib singing The Wheels on the Bus. Apparently he's up to "the people on the bus go up and down," because I just heard, "Up ee down? 'kay? kay."

Oh, and I didn't mention the garbage truck. On Friday while he was having breakfast I heard the garbage truck, so I grabbed him and we sat on the back steps watching it. The driver saw us and waved and beeped his horn, and Barak just stared at him gaping. When the truck drove on, he waved bye-bye with me. Then he turned to me and, struggling with his shock and awe, said, "Garbage. Garbage truck. Garbage innair [in there.]"

Pause.

"They put garbage innair!"

Indeed they do.

The boundless bounty of my sister-in-law

Two weeks after Iyyar was born, my domestic (as opposed to Israeli) SIL (hereinafter referred to as DSIL) came for Iyyar's bris with her husband, brood, and a freezer chest. I was so tired, emotional, and generally out of it that I didn't really notice the last item. I saw it go into the basement, where our freezer is, and didn't think much more about it other than to think, "wow, that's so nice, and how DID she do that with X kids of whom the youngest is four months old?" The next Shabbos someone brought us a meal, and the one after that I made pulled something out of the upstairs freezer for dinner and we were asked out for lunch. The Shabbos after that I looked in the downstairs freezer.

Wow.

The freezer was FULL. Of chicken, kugel, more kugel, all Barak's favorite kugels. I have not cooked for a single Shabbos meal since Iyyar was born. I know that some of that was food people brought us for Pesach while I was on bedrest, but I think most of it is from DSIL. I took the last pan of chicken today, but there's still a broccoli kugel and a pumpkin kugel in there.

It's going to be like this when Moshiach comes, right? The bottomless Shabbos freezer?

Teeth-clenching

Okay, I knew this would be frustrating. I knew this wouldn't be easy. I knew I was asking for it trying to toilet-train an opinionated two-year-old with a new baby in the house. But I also knew that there wouldn't be a better time anytime soon. He's starting playgroup, and playgroup requires that they wear a diaper or a pull-up until they're totally reliable; in my mind, starting to toilet train him and then putting a diaper back on him is just telling him it's okay to pee where he's standing. Mixed messages that we don't want.

So. This is where we are. We know that Barak has bowel control par excellence. He can go to bed with a full bladder and wake up dry. But he'll pee on the floor before he gets to the toilet. He'll hold it for hours, or all day; and then ask for multiple potty trips after going to bed, only to say "no potty! down!" and go right back to bed--and poop in his underwear and pee on the floor.

Anyone else think this is a control thing? Yeah, me too.

Rewards work, somewhat. But not enough. I'm not going to punish him for peeing on the floor--he's too young and I don't think it's appropriate. I do tell him, seriously, multiple times a day, that we do not pish on the floor or in our beds or in our underwear, and that the only place we do this is where? yes, Barak, on the potty. He knows. He knows full well. But he also has a mind of his own.

He has to want to do it. He doesn't. How do I make it attractive? I happen to have a tricycle in a box, purchased for $20 on sale, that I am fully prepared to use as bribery, but I don't think there is a good way to do that. He gets chocolate chips for successful trips, and he likes those, and I don't think upping the ante is a smart move. He gets tons of praise too.

I'm thinking I might get a potty seat instead of a small seat that goes on top of the toilet, so he can do it all himself without help. He'd probably go for that. Ada thinks I should put clothes back on him so that going in his underwear makes him uncomfortable--when he's naked, she says, there are no consequences. True enough.

It's 8:45 and he just fell asleep after two and a half hours.

I think I should go to bed.

Phone

This post is mostly for people who know us. If you've called us in the last year, you'll know that our phone message says, "Hello, you've reached the Uberimma family. If you're calling for Rosemary Johnson or Robert Stamps, THIS IS NOT THEIR NUMBER ANYMORE. If you're calling for the Uberimma family, please leave a message after the beep. Thank you."

Rosemary and Robert, apparently, owed a lot of people a lot of money, and the phone has not stopped ringing for them even though we've had this number since August. I've finally had it, and I had the number changed yesterday. The new number is unlisted, and you won't get a recording with the new number if you call the old one, so if you want it, please email me. Or call our cell phones--those numbers are the same as they've been since we changed those last November.

Full disclosure

So, I have been asked if Barak really is permanently cute and wonderful, or if I only blog the good parts. He is, of course, permanently cute and wonderful, and yes, generally I only blog the good parts. I tend to leave out things like last Friday night, when he sat on the potty for hours and hours and HOURS, holding it in DELIBERATELY, and then pishing all over the floor moments later. I also tend to leave out things like the following Shabbos afternoon, which doesn't even bear blogging about. Instead, I blog about things like this afternoon, when I finally got him three more packages of underwear, and delighted his little toddler heart with underpants that have Elmo on them. How does he know from Elmo? We don't have a TV. He's never seen Sesame Street. I asked Ada about this. "They all know Elmo," she said darkly. "They know through baby osmosis."

Today was better. I was confident enough of his empty bladder to take him out in the stroller this afternoon, with Iyyar in the Snugli. And he did fine, until we stopped by MHH's school and visited Barak's favorite secretary in the school office. She let him climb up into her swivel chair and type, and then we had to leave, and this development displeased Barak most greatly. He had something of a fit, and, well, so much for the dry underwear. Oh well. It's only what, Day Nine?

Happily, the bathroom entertainment has just been greatly improved by a Most Marvelous Box from Grandma E. Said Box arrived yesterday afternoon. I should have known based on experience that this would not be just a small box with a couple of books and some leftover sock yarn, which she had led me to expect; last year she said she'd send me some leftover wool to spin and I got, not the mailing envelope I was looking for, but a tremendous box full of all kinds of woolly marvels. Yesterday, we opened the Box of Wonders, which contained not only a treasure trove of books for Barak's potty reading pleasure, including a copy of Richard Scarry's Counting Book (which Barak sat and read all by himself for a good half hour this afternoon while I took care of the baby--verily a book worth its weight in gold), but enough yarn for four pairs of socks, light-up keychains for Barak and his buddy, muffin tins and papers for Barak the Muffin Man, a potholder for the dairy side of the kitchen (sorely lacking to date), and other delights too numerous to mention.

One of the books was Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, which involves some very scary, er, goblins. MHH read it to Barak tonight, complete with theatrical gasps of fear and horror and very dramatic voices. Barak was totally in love. "Barak, is it scary?" "'Cary! More 'cary! Gobbin 'cary!" And he gasped theatrically and covered his eyes in mock terror. "Did Grandma give you that book?" "Gimma!" Gimma is very good to us...

They're both asleep now (Barak and Iyyar--MHH is at shul), Barak, unfortunately, with wet underwear which he did not allow me to change. (He's not giving up Elmo so fast.) Iyyar is still turbo-nursing, and as many times as I tell him that the heft of his diapers and the emergence of a fourth chin belie his many fervent claims of malnutrition, he still feels the need to nurse hourly during the day. But at night he nurses with efficiency, determination, and three-hour chunks of sleep in between, so I'm not complaining too much. I have a toilet-training two-year-old and a six-week-old baby, and I still have time to blog, so I can't ask for much more than that.

The Potty Diaries

Day Eight of Diaper-Free Barak went pretty well. He woke up totally soaked, alas, but things got better from there. Only one mishap on the floor (during a post-nap I'm-not-really-awake-and-I-haven't-eaten-yet tantrum) and everything else went where it was supposed to go. And he earned his ice cream, too.

Now I have to go to the drugstore to buy more. Hope Breyer's is still on sale...

Talking more

When we went to the pediatrician's, before the doctor came in the nurse sat down with us and ran through her developmental checklist. Is he running? Dressing himself? How much is he talking--two-word sentences, three-word sentences, or can he use full sentences to tell a story?

I said three-word sentences, and immediatly felt a twinge of guilt. Do the three-word sentences count if they all involve "I don't want it!" or the word "no!" twice? Probably not.

Barak, apparently, picked up on my uneasy conscience and attempted to assuage it by promptly coming up with three-word sentences. This morning, we all went for bagels, and I made the mistake of handing Barak part of a hot bagel before the eggs were ready. He had lots of fun with the bagel ("Hot! Bagel hot!") and had no interest in the eggs once they showed up. He looked at them with a wrinkled nose. "I don't want it," he said. "Okay, if you don't want it, say, 'No thank you.'" "No thank you." "Okay," I said, and left it at that. But Barak wanted to be even more clear. He pushed his plate over to MHH, and said, very clearly, "Abba eat it." Wow.

And this afternoon, he woke up cranky from his nap, and didn't want to use the potty--since his crib was wet, and I didn't think it was so pressing, I let it go and put him in his high chair for snack. He was grumpy, and trying to tell me something I didn't understand. "Cold!" he seemed to be saying, holding his juice. "Is your juice cold from the fridge?" I asked. "NO!" he said, irritated. "I said COAT!"

Past tense! He's never done that before.

NEWS FLASH: Halfway though composing this post, I heard shouts of congratulation issuing from the bathroom, where MHH was entertaining Barak on his throne (a four-ounce juice box and six-ounce cup of water/OJ down...). We have poop!

They're in the kitchen eating their ice cream now. As of day 7, we've got 5 successes and 2 misses on this front. Not too bad.

Thought for the day

So, for those of you who have nursed a baby, or even just changed the diapers of a breastfed baby--

Have you ever been able to look at French's mustard quite the same way since?

Not the way I'd choose my dentist

Sign seen in a dentist's storefront this afternoon:

"WE BEAT ANY PRICE FOR ANY PROCEDURE GUARANTEED"

Cold turkey

Barak lost the diapers yesterday. I took off his diaper in the morning and said, "Bye bye diapers! All gone diapers!" He cheerfully waved bye-bye to the diapers with me, but didn't really have any idea of what was actually about to happen.

What happened was that I rolled up the rugs, put plastic sheets on the mattresses, made our bedroom off limits and started following him around the house all day plunking him on the toilet every time he seemed to get a faraway expression on his face. And keeping him there, as long as possible, with endless rounds of The Wheels on the Bus, endless readings of My Big Brother and Serious Trouble, and endless repetitions of both the ABC and aleph-beis songs. He now has special potty toys--two trains and a bulldozer, all Matchbox-car-sized--that he is only allowed to play with while actually sitting on the potty. Oh, and there is a case of paper towels at the ready in the back bedroom. Well, there was yesterday. We've gone through three rolls already.

So far we are batting about .500 on the pishing front. The problem seems to be that he goes just a little about every fifteen minutes. (I know, you wanted to know ALL about this, didn't you?) So there have been a number of accidents, which Barak now points out to me. I then transport him swiftly to the bathroom, even though it's too late, to make the point that THIS IS WHERE WE DO THAT, NOT THE LIVING ROOM FLOOR. And then I hand him a roll of paper towels, and he cheerfully tears off a few (he doesn't usually get to do that), wipes it up, and throws the paper towels in the garbage. But he's also earned a fair number of chocolate chips, yesterday and today.

As of this morning, however, it had become pretty clear that nothing more, er, substantial had made its way into the toilet (or, fortunately, onto the floor). Barak had, it seemed, decided that if he couldn't poop the way he wanted (e.g., into a diaper) he wasn't going to do it at all. Yesterday we promised ice cream. Today we upped the ante, and promised ice cream and a Muppets episode. I don't know if that's what did the trick, or if he forgot what he didn't want to do while sitting on the toilet. One way or another, he earned himself the mitva song AND the mazal tov song (yep, the one you sing in shul when there's a bar mitzva or an aufruf or a new baby), AND ice cream AND the Muppets. A red-letter day indeed. Thank Gd Ada is still here until next week--it is not easy to take care of a five-week-old baby and a toilet-training two-year-old at the same time. Yesterday I spent two hours straight sitting on the bathroom floor nursing Iyyar and entertaining Barak on his throne.

And no, I'm not putting him to bed in diapers either. It's warm, and he's got an undershirt and underpants, and even if they all get wet the worst thing that he'll be will be wet and uncomfortable--which is good. No, I'm not totally sure this will work, but I do know that all over Europe toddlers are toilet trained well before they're two, and diapers are long history by now. If they can do it, so can he. Of course, in Hungary the usual way to toilet train a toddler is to have grandma or a big sister take the job on full-time, and do nothing else but treat the baby like a puppy all day long. Which isn't really an option for us. B"H we have wood floors...

Is it a little crazy to be doing this now? Yes, in a way. But it's also the best time. I've got seven more weeks at home. In three weeks, Barak starts playgroup, and is not going to be in my clutches full-time. I've got two more weeks of Ada here in the morning, so I'm not the only potty policewoman.

Well, further bulletins as events warrant. One more thing that was funny, though. Yesterday, I went to Target and bought two packages of underwear--the only two they had. One was a three-pack of Batman underwear (MHH is SO jealous). We have, as I may have mentioned, a bust of Batman in our house that is actually a bank, which functions as a tzedaka box--I bought it for MHH when Barak was at the age of putting everything in his mouth, in an attempt to break MHH of the habit of dropping change everywhere. Barak likes to give tzedaka--it's fun to drop the coins in the little slot. If he sees a coin on the floor, he picks it up and says, "Daka! Daka!" and wants to put it in our Batman pushka.

So, anyway. Yesterday, I gave Barak his new underwear, with much fanfare. He looked at it, not terribly impressed. "Look, Barak! New underwear! Are you such a big boy now? Who's that on your underwear?" "Daka!"

Well, we all knew that Batman was a mitzva boy too.

"

Eleven through thirteen

11. This morning Barak and Iyyar and a friend of ours (and I, obviously) all went for a walk. We went to the bagel store, ate bagels, and came home. I had Iyyar in the sling, in which he slept beatifically, and my friend pushed the stroller. Barak distinguished himself during this expedition with incredibly menschlich behavior. He did not scream. He did not campaign for cookies, even though they were clearly on display. He waited nicely for his bagel ("Wait nicely! Yeah!") and ate it nicely. He sat patiently in his stroller while we stopped in the bookstore. And when we got home--no, really, this is my kid I'm talking about here--he went into his crib and took a nice long nap without a peep. Yeah, I know. My kid. The one who thinks naps are for babies and the weak. He went to sleep without screaming tonight, too. If he hadn't been happy and playing all day I'd think he was sick or something.

12. Grandma E, when she visited last year, brought Barak a Richard Scarry book called Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Hidden on most of the pages is a miniscule creature called a Goldbug. This is sort of a precursor to Where's Waldo--Goldbug is very small and very hard to find. This afternoon, while I was busy with Iyyar, MHH and Barak sat down with the book and looked for Goldbug. And twice Barak found it all by himself.

I can't even do that. We were, shall we say, impressed. And every time Barak found Goldbug, with or without help, MHH congratulated him, shook his hand, and commended him with a hearty yasher koach (or, as we Ashkenazim pronounce it, "shkoyach!"--remember, it's one word.) So when I came in to see what was going on, and found myself a Goldbug, Barak very seriously offered me his hand. "Shkoch!" Oh yeah.

13. Barak pished on the potty again today. But today was a milestone because, while in the bathtub, he announced, "Potty!" And Abba promptly removed him from the tub and sat him on the toilet, where he did indeed proceed to pish--earning himself a rousing rendition of the mitzvah song and a bowl of ice cream after his bath. If he manages to poop in the potty tomorrow, he has been informed, he will get ice cream and a cookie. And it will then be time for the diaper-free toddler. And time for me to roll up and put away the rugs.

A little post-sefira entertainment

Here, brought to you by MO Chassid.

The kinderlach files

Barak is at the zoo with Ada, Iyyar is hanging out on a blanket on the floor, I don't have the koach to start cooking for Shavuos yet, and it's been too long since I've done one of these, so:

1. We went to the pediatrician on Wednesday for Barak's 2-year and Iyyar's 4-week checkup. I walked, with Barak in the stroller and Iyyar in the Snugli. It was something of a workout, but we got there okay. I do have a double stroller, but it is only for three months and up, so this is the intermediate solution. I think we'll be fine till August like this--I'm glad it's summer.

The visit went fine. Barak behaved himself very nicely, doing what I asked and keeping himself busy eating crackers while the doctor was looking at Iyyar. Both boys are around the 75th percentile for height and Barak is at the 27th for weight--much better than the 6th percentile he hovered at for a while. Iyyar, on the other hand, has shot from the 7 lb 2 oz he was when discharged from the hospital three weeks ago to 9 lb 6 oz. The pediatrician kept saying, "Wow, he gained a lot of weight. Wow, that's more than two ounces a day!" I guess all that nursing is doing something.

2. They are already so different in so many ways, besides the obvious one of Iyyar sleeping while Barak never did. Iyyar hates dirty or wet diapers and will wake up crying if he has one; Barak still couldn't care less if his pajamas are full of poop. If you heard a peep from a sleeping Barak at this age, that was it, he was waking up (and it was usually four minutes since you'd put him down); Iyyar will not only put himself back to sleep, but will put himself to sleep if you put him in his crib still mostly awake (assuming he's got a full tummy, a dry diaper, and is tired). But they look identical--pictures of Barak at this age could be pictures of Iyyar.

3. A few weeks ago, I showed Barak a short video clip from the Oregon Zoo site, titled "Recycling at the Oregon Zoo." It shows how the elephants are fed branches from the zoo's garden, which they then eat, and how the manure is then shoveled up, turned into compost and returned to the garden. I thought he'd like it because of the elephants; I didn't realize that it also involved a truck, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a small bulldozer. For Barak, all trucks are garbage trucks, and have been for a while, so it's understandable that when he sees a truck he says, "Garbage!" But people have found it surprising that when he sees a truck, he now also says, "Garbage! Elephant! Nanure!"

4. Toilet training is proceeding apace. Barak is very into the chocolate chip part of this process, and doesn't mind the sitting on the potty part either, especially if I let him take some toilet paper and flush it. However, actually producing has not really gone very far. Yesterday, however, he did in fact pish, which I told the pediatrician when he asked. The doctor said to Barak, sounding very impressed, "Did you pish in the potty? Wow!" Barak modestly concurred. "Choc chip."

5. Right after Barak was born, someone in the grocery store handed me a coupon for a free box of Breyer's fruit pops. I haven't really had them since, but in the grocery store on Wednesday they were buy one get one free, and I remembered how good they were, and it was really really hot, so I got four boxes. I've been letting Barak have one a day in the afternoon, after he's been playing outside. The other day, he started asking for something. "Muktza! Mo muktza!" He wants muktza? Huh? It's not even Shabbos. I couldn't figure it out, so I picked him up and asked him to show me. He directed me to the freezer and to the "momuktza!" Ah-ha. That would be popsicle. Gotcha.

6. Also after Barak was born, when he was about three weeks old--possibly on the same grocery store trip--I ran into someone I knew slightly. "Is he a good baby?" she asked. I didn't say anything, but found this fairly outrageous. He's three weeks old. Tell me, please, how a three-week-old baby could be bad. I always regretted not pointing this out. Last week, someone asked me the same question about Iyyar. I told her that all babies are wonderful, but if she was asking me if he cried a lot, the answer was no. Which is, B"H, true.

7. Does anybody out there who knows me want to come visit the third week in July, from the 9th till the 14th? MHH will be out of town for work and I'll be home by myself. If I don't get a visitor, I'll probably go somewhere, but I'm hoping to talk someone into coming here. We have central AC and a guest room...

8. If I ever mention anything on this blog about baking chocolate chip cookies, tell me not to. I have a reasonable amount of self-control when it comes to food. I can leave ice cream in the freezer and I can even keep diet coke in the house if it's not cold. But chocolate chip cookies that I made, forget about it, once they're made they're as good as eaten. This is salient particularly because I weighed myself while at the pediatrician's. I've lost twenty pounds since Iyyar was born, which means I have thirteen to go to get to where I was before I got pregnant with him and, er, twenty-three to get to where I was before I was pregnant with Barak, which is the goal here. If I can take lots of walks (meaning, if it doesn't get too hot too soon) and I can stay away from the cookies, I think I can get most of the way there by the end of the summer. But NO COOKIES. Hold me to that, please. (The ones already in the house for Shavuos are exempt from this. I'm not throwing them out, although I might give most of them away to my pregnant neighbor, if she comes to get them.)

9. Marika neni has left us for a better job with more hours and better pay. She's going back to Romania in the fall, which we knew, so it had to happen. I'm sorry to see her go, but it's definitely better for her. I'll miss the Hungarian practice though (not to mention the shiny floors--I've never waxed a floor in my life and I doubt I'm about to start now.)

10. Hmm, there has to be a number ten. Oh, right. The stove. I'm liking the stove. The Shabbos mode is very handy, although a little nerve-racking--nothing comes up on the display as you're setting it, obviously, so you just have to go on faith and hope you've done it right. Last week, I didn't--I set it too high, and then when MHH came home from shul Friday night and saw that I'd fallen asleep, he decided to be nice and let me have an hour before waking me up for dinner. So everything was in the oven on about 450 for about 3 hours. And dinner was reduced to speed cholent.

Huh, I seem to have veered off the subject of kinderlach. Well, what can I say, I'm tired. And our bedroom is a disaster, and I don't think Iyyar has a single clean and dry outfit. Why is it that no matter how you put a diaper on a newborn, they will pee right through or over or around them? Why why why? And why is it that one room in the house must always be a complete catastrophe, no matter how much time I spend tidying?

Well, anyway. Kitchen first, then laundry. Then bed. Or maybe I'll knit a little. Or something.