Eh.

It can be very grating to spend my mornings with a group of lazy, apathetic teenagers.  For the most part they are your average 14/15-year-olds, eyes glazed over, talking non-stop, and drinking overly caffeinated beverages.  However, the majority of them are also brilliant, which may only add to my aggravation.

Suffice it to say they may be rubbing off on me.  I have always been a procrastinator, but it may be getting worse.  For example, I haven't updated this blog for a week.

I just didn't feel like it.

It's not like nothing happened, I did turn 30 last week.  THIRTY.  

JG is cutting two teeth, which is really adding to her...um, pleasant demeanor?  Last night she would not sleep without me, so I just threw the towel in and went to bed early with her.  It's uncomfortable, my arms fall asleep, but by golly she didn't cry all night.  (We here at the PoetsHead household don't have the patience for the "cry it out" method.  I've adopted my sisters logic: there is such a short window of time where you can fulfill ALL of your child's needs, why deny them something that can be so easy to give?)

Mael is out of his cone.  For now.  Already I can see his foot getting bad again, but I figure that he should have some time out of the confinement of his cone.

Alex brought home a Doctor Who pinball machine.  He now has FOUR pinball machines.

I am such a good wife.

I got my hair cut.  It's really short and I really like it, but the back of my head and neck are cold all the time.  What is up with that?

And, finally, JG is 10-months-old.  Holy crap, she'll be a year-old in no time.  

(Here she is last month, taming a wild balloon Alex gave her)

Words

I was being a bad mother earlier and letting JG play with plastic bags she found on the shelves while crawling around.  She had pulled one of the plastic tab things off and I bent over and said "Let mommy have that."

And you want to know what she said?

"No."

(I took it from her anyway, the sooner she learns that what she says doesn't matter the better...  in regards to the long list of things I do not want to find in her diaper.)

She continued to play with the plastic bags and started choking/coughing (not on the plastic tab), I asked her if she was okay, and you want to know what she said?

"Yeah."

Alex can confirm that.

Holy crap.

Words.

She'll be ten months old on Sunday, and in addition to those two words we have heard her say, "Hi", "Dad" (though Alex claims she didn't - even though she looked right at him and said it), and maybe "Mama."  However, she hasn't really looked directly at me and said that, but when she's upset she will repeat it until I scoop her up.

She also tries words.  She'll look at the cats and a sound similar to but not quite like "kitty" comes out of her mouth.  Other maybes include "dog" and "Stella" and maybe "Delihla" (her grandparents dog).

On the unfortunate front she had a bloody diaper on Monday, most likely from something she ate, not something I ate.  In hopes of helping her colon heal I am going back on my strict no milk diet.  No more milky goodness for me.  But that's okay, and I'll explain more in my next post.

Fortunately (or not) the craving part of my brain demanded that I buy donuts on Sunday, so I bought a cake donut and a jelly donut and ate one in the parking lot and the other in my driveway.

In about five minutes.

Seriously.

So.  Good.

A Good Mistake

I just ate a cookie.  I might pay for it later, but not how you think.

Let me back track -- last Thursday we went to Cafe Rio for giant burritos.  I asked the cashier what the horchata was like and in a moment of... shall we say thoughtlessness (?) I drank the sample she handed me.

For those of you who don't know, horchata is a mexican rice drink made with milk.  Milk, or rather, it's fat and flamboyant brother, condensed milk.

It was delicious.

I wanted to smack myself on the back of the head afterwards.  First off, tasting the horchata broke one of my many "avoiding milk for JG rules" -- don't eat anything white.  Because most white foods contain milk.

I spent the next day waiting for JG's reaction.  With the chocolate the reaction was immediate, with two days of her screaming bloody murder before pooping, but that was two months ago.

She was fine all day Friday, and by Saturday morning I was fantasizing about a bacon cheeseburger from Crown Burger.

Holy.  Mother.



Wait.

Understand for a moment that over the past seven months I have built a thick cast iron wall around my desire for anything milk related.  Yes, I have pined for donuts and dreamed about bingeing on a buffet of butter drenched goodness.  In the past whenever I ate anything with milk in it JG would poop blood and scream like crazy, so it was easier to avoid the milk than deal with my angry baby.

Convinced my fantasy was just a fantasy, I asked Alex for his input.  Was I correct in my observation of JG's non/slow/reduced reaction?

He CONFIRMED it and agreed to a visit to the burger Val Halla of Salt Lake valley.

OH.  MY.  GOD.

The cheese was so sweet it overpowered the bacon.  OVERPOWERED it.  If you're a vegetarian or something crazy like that, you may not understand the magical properties bacon contains.  I am positive a bacon fairy exists to spread joy on earth... however...

The cheese fairy is bigger and systematically beat the bacon fairy's ass in the taste category.

For me, anyway.

We watched JG carefully for the rest of the day for signs, and there were none.  No screaming, no bloody diapers (NO BLOODY DIAPERS), nothing to say, "This hurts, I'm disappointed, and I hate you."

Only.  The only thing that hinted at a reaction was some wakefulness.  Thursday she woke up at 10:30 PM (she goes to bed around 7) and would not go back to sleep until midnight, and Saturday morning she woke at 4:00 AM and didn't fall back to sleep until 5:30 AM.

It could have been the cheese, or it could be teething.  (Teething exists simply to torture mothers with guessing games.)

Other than wakefulness JG was fine.



I was not.


I don't want to go into detail, but the toilet and I made friends.

Apparently going on a strict no milk diet has made my guts forget how to digest the stuff.

I spent Sunday feeling queasy.  I spent Sunday thinking of how to slowly work milk back into my diet.  Strangely enough, rather than being super excited, I'm frightened.

So, when JG screamed before pooping Monday night I was both relieved and saddened.

It may have been the milk, or it could have been something else.

For now I might sample small pieces of things with milk ingredients, but I won't go full tilt.  I am so thrilled that JG's system is healing and progress is being made in terms of maturation.

So, Milk, I'm eyeing you.  Soon, Milk, soon.