C. now offers kisses on request, and Jon made the observation that honestly, baby kisses - slobbery, open mouthed, tongue extended assaults on your face - are pretty much exactly like the very worst kisses you ever endured from would-be adolescent paramours. Only for some reason, when C. kisses me like that, I honestly just can’t get enough. I beg her to slobber on me again and again.
…you aggressively, angrily even, struggle with your car door after leaving a restaurant and returning to the parking lot. As you stab at the remote control button on your keys over and over, and yank on the stubbornly un-budging car door door to no avail, you suddenly realize, this isn’t my car door….and this isn’t my car.
And tonight, I am going to bed earlier.
The Hickman-Granju bunch is hosting an Obama-speech watching shindig on the last night of the DNC.
If you are local, and I haven’t invited you and you would like to come, e-mail me.
So my several-day breastfeeding interruption is over. I have finished the baby-teeth-rotting antibiotics, and I am apparently no longer toxic to my babygurl. My sister asked whether I thought she would just wean altogether if I stopped nursing for 4 days. After all, I am already away from her (at my job) many hours each week, and she already drinks from a cup and bottle, and she eats lots of solids. Plus, during the several day hiatus, she really never asked to nurse.
But I know my kidlet, and I knew she would pick right back up where she left off once I was done with the drugs. And she did. And she nursed ALL NIGHT last night, which was exhausting, but also sorta lovely, after the break.
I will say that four days without nursing her gave me a real sense of what it must feel like to live with a botched, over-inflated set of implants. Yowza, I was ready to feed that baby. No, I didn’t pump. Because as I’ve mentioned many times before, I hate pumping, plus I’m pretty lazy that way, and I knew that after 13 months of breastfeeding, my supply wasn’t going anywhere. That’s just how my body works.
So now I am preparing for my first business trip with my brand new job. I’ll be traveling to Texas for several days. The older children will spend some extra time with their father, and Jon will be handling baby C. duties. I have another trip (this one just overnight, to Denver) slated for October.
Let me be very clear that I am not happy about the fact that I will be leaving my nursling child for several days. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to do it. I know it will be very hard on me, but she will be fine, because she has her Daddy (who is a full parent in every sense of the word, night and day), and her grandparents, and her Aunt Betsy.
Business travel with a young child is not ideal. But the bottom line is that I have to earn a living for my family, and my new job requires some away travel. That’s life, and we’re just going to have to deal with it. On the other hand, now that I am no longer working in a newsroom, I will not be getting the calls on the weekend to rush in to work (or stay really late some nights) because news is breaking.
(And by the way, as much I am enjoying the new gig, I really do miss my friends from my old job, and yes, the hustle and bustle of that newsroom.)
This particular configuration of the cousins had a most excellent weekend, mostly spent together.
She can walk! She’s toddling all over the place. She started Saturday morning, and by Sunday, she was getting around pretty well. She still crawls when she really wants to gets omewhere quickly, but I’ll bet she’ll pretty much be a walker within a week or two.
My husband is a god among men. Truly he is. Every day I wake up wondering how in the world, after a lifetime of making, ahem, poor romantic decisions, I happened to luck into a guy this kind, honest, steady, hardworking, loving, clever, hot, funny, politically aware, etc, etc, etc. He’s so good to me. And he’s such an incredible father and stepfather. I gave my three older children a wonderful gift by adding this person to their family mix.
He puts up with a lot from me, starting with the fact that he married into a rather complicated blended, post-divorce family. He never bats an eye at the issues this raises in our lives. He just holds my hand, fixes dinner, and then makes me laugh - getting me re-focused on what really matters. He also sets a great example of being a thoroughly decent human being for all the children who know him as father, stepfather, uncle or friend.
I love him. Can you tell?
Come on down to The Valarium tonight for Knoxville Bands Together, a benefit show put together by my friend, the lovely Leslie Woods to benefit the survivors of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church shooting.
Jon, E., Baby C. and I will be there.
Thanks to my friend Barbara Nicholson, who is one of the co-founders of Attachment Parenting International, I was able to offer a pretty cool contribution to the auction portion of the event. Barbara’s husband Gary Nicholson is a very well known songwriter in Nashville, and through her connections, she rustled up a signed Robert Plant/Allison Krauss CD, a signed Delbert McClinton CD and many other great music items. E. was very impressed that we were carting Robert Plant’s autograph in our car over to the venue this afternoon 
Hope to see you there. Come over and say hi to us.
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