never fully-clothed or intentionally misinforming

My son is two months old already. His life is already going by faster than I care to acknowledge.  When I look at him, usually when he is laying at my breast, fully satiated and half asleep, I think of all the ways I am afraid I will one day let him down. Hell, it has already started. I wanted so desperately to exclusively breastfeed my baby. I both admire and resent the women who do this, the women whose babies have never met a baby bottle. In my realm, it is just not possible.  The first time I put a bottle to his lips, I wept. I looked into his sad eyes and felt heartache and disappointment transfer from him to me in that exchange. How could a mother give up on breastfeeding?  How could I expect my infant son to understand and process the logic of providing a bottle to satisfy his hunger if I couldn't do the same? And what if it wasn't hunger? What if his tears were the ones that meant he needed to be held and to nurse from his mother for comfort, not ...

What are we up to on a random Tuesday night, you ask? Oh, ya know, taking in a ska show. My amazing husband knows how I like to spend my free time... And his. Thank you,  Jon-Michael . Hope you're okay with your son being a ska kid - right now he has no choice. This is how we celebrate 8.5 months pregnant in our family. Last week, at our 37 week check up with our midwife, Libby, we gained her blessing to attend a ska show in Orlando. We had done our homework though and presented a very well-thought-out case. We knew where the closest hospital was, we had my hospital bag packed and in tow, we had already agreed I would not be floor-level or engaged with the crowd, and I would do absolutely no jumping. That last commitment was the hardest, to be perfectly honest. How do I not jump to songs that practically beg it of you?! So after work on Tuesday, JM and I headed down to House of Blues. After walking around the venue for just a couple of minutes, we were able to find a pie...

It's interesting how reading one article about the common struggles of sleeping while pregnant will reaffirm my sentiment of being incredibly fortunate these last eight and a half months. In the beginning everyone who heard me say I wasn't having any difficulties with nausea or sleep would tell me, ' just you wait...' At this point though, I'm practically across the finish line and haven't encountered one single, solitary time when I thought I'm not going to make it through the day without vomiting , or I've been laying in bed for three hours and still haven't slept; I might as well get up for the day ... at 2 AM. No, I'm truly fortunate. And you know, I hope that's a sign of a healthy, happy baby - and maybe, if it's not too much to ask, even one who will sleep through the night from the first night he's home. We'll see. I'm certainly not trying to press my luck. One thing I am struggling with though is my inability to be f...

At a point in life when I'm pregnant, looking to save every penny I can, and welcome the tips of anyone who has a knack for any kind of savings solutions, the great debate of cloth versus disposable diapers seems to surface more frequently than any other suggestion. And it's probably the most polarizing recommendation I've heard yet. Every reaction from "oh god, no" to "best decision I ever made" has been uttered in front of me. Why such controversy?  As it turns out, cloth diapering can be pretty gnarly business. It never occurred to me that I would have to take a crap-coated towel off my child's rump, dump it into the toilet, flush, then swish the turdy towel around in the clean toilet water, before coating it in baking soda and setting it in a bucket to wait for a washer's worth of them to pile up. That does sound kind of like, "oh god, no" to me. That's just one perspective though. As one mom-friend was quick to point out,...

Well, I've really done it this time. I'm three months from having our first baby, we're working on getting the nursery set up, JM is doing all the ladder work - taping off the ceiling and spackling any pin holes to prepare the walls for paint - it's going to be cornflower blue. We're having a boy. I'm behind him, spraying the last of the wallpaper with DIF remover (which, by the way, I later discovered contains a chemical known in the state of California to cause cancer... joy). Something makes him curious and he chips away at a piece of loose ceiling spackling in the corner. Black mold. Fuck. "Just go ahead and get out of the room while I see just how bad this is..." I'm waiting down the hall, in the kitchen and it just keeps getting worse. My tears start to well up. Just what am I supposed to do with this disaster? Every time we decide to dive into a home project we uncover some kind of puttied-over royal disaster the owner before us left b...

I have this overwhelming desire to do better with my life, to find something more worth doing, to find a way to commingle my home happiness and my work happiness.  Maybe everyone feels that from time to time. Maybe not. Lately I have realized many of my friends have made a living doing what they love. I know entrepreneurs, writers, photographers, artists, and humanitarians. And I know me. And what do we all have in common? The passion for what we love so greatly. So how is it then that I find myself parked in a mildly satisfying, depressingly paid corporate job when my friends have found the way to feed their passions and fund their lifestyles?  What am I missing? Perhaps just the bravery to take he leap. I have a passion for something. And that is art. No, I won't get more specific for you. I love art - all mediums. I am a photographer. I have been a painter. I am a paper craftsman, a writer, and a ceramics amateur. I am many things and love all things related to art. And in ...

We went to the gym yesterday. It was pretty excellent. After almost convincing myself not to go, JM finally got my head right and talked me into going with him. I hit he elliptical pretty hard did 100 crunches before calling it a day and heading home to clean house. But before I left, I got the gym compliment so far - "you're looking slim! Whatever you're doing, keep it up; it's working."  Those two sentences, two sentences that took Ian just seconds to speak, will resonate with me until the next time someone says something equally as motivating. "You're looking slim!" When I don't feel like working out - "you're looking slim," when I'm tempted my treats brought into work by a client - "you're looking slim!" So I keep going. And I will keep going because it makes me feel better, stronger, and more confident. And you know, it's not that I'm not confident - I do love myself. I just want to be in the physical ...