Young and Moony-eyed

Today is our five year wedding anniversary.  Five is a good round number.  Five is something to stand on.  Five means we must be doing something right.

Was this that long ago?

Did we live here...for two and a half years?

Was I THAT BIG?

Was he THAT SMALL?

Or THIS SMALL?

Were we THAT DRUNK?  (Obviously this one is not chronological)

I wrote this in a journal not long after we got married, and nothing has changed.  We are still young and moony-eyed.

“i know that we are young and moony-eyed, and at the risk of sounding naive, it’s just so easy. it’s easy to be in love, i don’t stretch and we don’t meet in the middle, because neither has to leave where they are to be together. i’m proud and flattered and i have the ultimate freedom to never have to apologize for being what i am, to not be afraid to misstep, to not hold my breath. c’est une vie sans souci. it’s hard not to smile about it all, and why would you try to fight it.”

Recipe: Fat Pops!

When you eat a paleo diet, as we do, it can sometimes be challenging to eat enough fat.  A low-carbohydrate must also be a high-fat diet, and it's tough to be a fat-eater in a low-fat world.

If our routine weren't somewhat dictated by my husband's work schedule, we would eat a big fat breakfast and a big fat early dinner and that's it.  When I eat a big fat breakfast, I'm not ever hungry by lunch time, but around 3 or 4pm I'm ready to eat again.  Ideally, I'd just go ahead and eat another big meal, but John doesn't get home from work until around 6:30, so I need to hold out until then.  Those two or three hours are dangerously snacky.

I don't want to cook anything because I'm about to have to cook dinner.  I don't want to eat anything carb-y and virtually all convenient foods are.  Fruit and nuts just make me hungrier, and beef jerky is too expensive to buy often and too much of a pain in the ass to make often myself.  Most lunch meat is suspect, but even the good stuff doesn't do a whole lot for me.

Dreaded Twiddling

Can I just take a moment to talk about twiddling?

I hate twiddling.

Twiddling, diddling, fiddling - whatever you want to call it, I hate it.

I am, of course, talking about what older nursing babies love to do more than anything in the world: play with the other nipple.  It seems that some are more fanatical than others, and I think mine is right up there with the most eager and persistent of them.  One boob is simply not sufficient - he must have them both.

It's a compulsion.  He can't help it - he must keep trying no matter how many times I brush his hand away and try to distract him.  Anyone remember that cinematic gem Idle Hands?  He has no control over it.  His particular style is to flip his hand upside down in a manner that is very difficult to convey in words, he sort of twists it so that his fingers are pointing back towards his face, and slips his thumb into my bra and then passes it back and forth over my nipple.  Oh, my skin crawls just thinking about it.

It's worst when he's trying to go to sleep.  You would think nursing would be enough of a comfort, but if one chi-chi is good, then two must be better.  

It's obviously an extreme source of comfort for him, so I hesitate to deny him outright, but this is one thing where my needs come out ahead, because if I allowed it I would hate nursing him, and that wouldn't be fair to either one of us.  Every now and then I entertain the idea of just letting him go at it, in the hopes that once it isn't forbidden it will lose its appeal, but I never last.  Five seconds into it I've got goosebumps and restless legs like I've got the DTs.  The Dreaded Twiddles.

Having just spent twenty minutes shooing away his e'er-wandering hand, I needed to let that out.  I don't hate many things about mothering, but I hate that.  

Some answers!

WHOA.  I got a lot of response to the last post, and it seems I need to clarify some things!

First - I don't have a "No I-love-you" policy.  I do have an authenticity policy, and I won't force myself to say something that doesn't feel right.  If it's instinctual for you, gracious, by all means say it twelve hundred times a day!  That post was meant as an explanation for why I feel silly saying it to my son, but not to anyone else; it was not a how-to.

I will reiterate that the biggest reason I think I don't like saying it is that I feel like it's unnecessary (I might as well make a ritual of telling him before he goes to bed, "I am your mother"), and besides, seems to insinuate that there is another possibility: that I'm capable of not loving him, which isn't true.  It's like...if John came home one night and said, "Sweetie, I would never divorce you."  Well, I would hope not!  Shouldn't I be able to take that for granted?

A Case Against "I Love You"

I have a confession: I don't tell Felix I love him.

I am very conscious of not saying it, but if I try to say it, it feels forced and awkward and so I just don't.  I don't write about loving him, I don't talk about loving him, I don't tweet or Facebook or blog about loving him.  I freely tell other people that I love them without any hesitation, so what makes it different with my baby?

For a while I thought it was maybe that I felt silly since he couldn't understand me.  But that can't be it...I talk to him all day long, I ask him questions he can't answer, like which brand of pickles we should buy.  I tell him plenty of things that are beyond his limits of understanding.  Then I thought it was maybe that he wasn't able to reciprocate, at least in words.  But the point of telling someone you love them isn't to get a parroted response (is it?), so that can't be it either.

It isn't something that bothers me much anyway, so I let it go.