HELP

I need it, but I hate needing it. In this day and age, why should anyone lend a hand when you're the crazy fool who decided to have all those kids? I made my bed.

There are lots of nice people who help us many times, many ways. Some people even get unhappy if I don't pester them enough (!). But in the back of my mind, I feel a lot of pressure to represent and not need the help. I want people to have no reason to doubt it when we say that children are a blessing and that God won't give you more than you can handle. I want people to look at us and think, that doesn't look so bad! I don't want to be the frazzled, exhausted, weepy mom in a dirty sweatshirt with a cobwebby house full of scraggly kids and overdue library books; living proof of the necessity of limiting family size. I don't want to give people a reason to think that our four kids under five are why I'm neurotic. I was neurotic to begin with, but they don't know that.

So here's my horrible secret: I can't do this. I'm too selfish and too lazy and too plain bad at all of it. I'm too scared to go through labor again. There's no way I'm hobbling through another third trimester with a painfully hyperextended pelvis. I'm done with 45-minute nursing sessions three times a night. I'm no good with kids, my own included. I can't keep up this act. This is more than I can handle. I am maudlin, dirtily shirted, and librarily negligent.

Don't tell, though, ok? I'm sure no one would believe it anyway.

Wittenberg roulette

We had a great civics lesson with our 5-year-old yesterday watching the 60 Minutes profile of Justice Scalia yesterday. There was a lot of good stuff in it, but naturally this stuck with me most:

Narration: The marriage has flourished: they have 9 children and 28 grandchildren.

Leslie Stahl: Why so many children?

Maureen Scalia: Well, as someone said, they’re both overachievers, I guess.

Justice Scalia: Well, we didn't set out to have nine children. We're just old-fashioned Catholics, you know? Playing what used to be known as "Vatican roulette."

That's right, girls; nine kids is the rough vocational equivalent of Supreme Court Justice (maybe because you could fill the bench with your own children). Mrs Scalia--and Mrs Stuckwisch!--we salute you.

Car seats: Not just for road trips anymore

I may have mentioned this in my previous rant about sleeping arrangements, but current household circumstances remind me of what a wondrous invention the infant car seat is. For sleeping. This latest kid has spent far more time in his car seat in the house than in the van. To settle or resettle him, we simply swing him a bit (see also: postpartum exercise).

And for the paranoid among us (paranoia being a category which I would have invented, had it not already existed), this is perfectly safe. He's on his back. He's secure. The arrangement has been approved by our former pediatrician, our current family doc, and the local baby nurse/lactation consultant (who confessed that one of her kids slept in his till he was 6 months old--!).

This is a very good thing.

Added benefit: if I suddenly get ambitious enough to take the kids to the library or realize we're out of milk, I don't have to wake him up to pack him along: just pop the seat into place and we're good to go. (Well, after everyone's bathroom stops, coats, shoes, etc. "Good to go" is, as we all know, a bit more of a process than the simple phrase implies.)

The Cloth Diaper Project

I've always wanted to try them, but when we started having babies we didn't have our own laundry facility. Then the investment scared me--what if we dropped all that cash and I hated them? But I think my mother-in-law has been reading Kelly's inflammatory rhetoric ;), because out of nowhere she started sewing up cloth diapers like mad and mailing them to me. They are fitteds with an internal PUL liner. My oversized three month old wears them, and I also put them on my undersized almost-2-year-old during naps (which, in addition to overnight, is the only time she wears diapers now, woo hoo!). They are comfortably snug in the legs on both kids; I just cinch the Velcro fasteners tighter for Baby Dude. We are only partially operational so far while she sends me small batches of different designs for testing.

Analysis

--This is a much more intimate enterprise than disposables. I don't know if I could have handled it on Baby 1, but I'm pretty well acclimated to extremely disgusting things by now. Do not attempt without a sprayer that attaches to your toilet, it's too demoralizing otherwise. Yes, yes, we have it so much easier than our mothers. Blessed are they.

--I don't know if I would want to go this route postpartum. My postpartum day looks like this: sitting on the couch, feeding the baby on the couch, napping with the baby on the couch, changing the baby on the couch, getting an older kid to throw away the diaper I just changed. Getting up and rinsing yellow poo out of 97 diapers a day isn't going to fit into that setup seamlessly.

--And it would be 97 diapers because they are always, always wet or worse, even with that PUL liner. Disposables absorb a lot of pee and you don't notice it (sometimes you can't even tell if they're wet). Cloth diapers are always soaked, so you go through a ton of them.

--An overnight disposable diaper is gross. I can hardly imagine how gross an overnight cloth diaper would be considering what they're like after 45 minutes. I'm afraid the carpet would be saturated. I'm not using them overnight. (Or what passes for overnight with my primary test subject.)

--They're very bulky.

--They're very cute.

--But you can't ever see how cute they are, since you always have to put plastic pants over them, since they're (see above) always, always wet. I have one diaper cover from Kushies, and it doesn't work AT ALL (also PUL, I think--can't say I'm too impressed with the stuff). So I'm using those old school Gerber numbers. I don't like them but they keep me from having to change Baby's clothes every time I change his diaper. IMHO, this pretty much shoots down the "breathability" argument you hear for cloth diapers for anyone who can't afford those fancy shmancy wool covers (and do they really work, really? Grandma is going to make one for me to try so I'll let you know). Breathable and dry are mutually exclusive. Grandma notes that PUL is described as a "wetness barrier," not "waterproof." Riiiiiight.

--Costs are going to go up during the winter. I'm relying heavily on line drying now because the sun dries, disinfects, and bleaches free. If the line isn't an option, you have to run the dryer on high heat for a LONG time (and they still aren't bleached). Dryers are the second most expensive appliance to run, so I'm not too keen on that. Church pays our utilities and I don't want to pass on the costs of this scheme. We could throw in an extra check to offset it, but it still bothers me. Nobody likes seeing the bills go up.

--They're very gratifying to use. Disposables always feel so wasteful--those huge boxes of stuff, just tossed in the trash year after year.

--I can't help thinking that if I were a baby, I'd be more comfortable in a disposable that pulls all the wetness away from my skin than a cloth that spreads it over the entire area of the diaper, making me that much wetter. (No results to report on diaper rash, this guy doesn't get it with either. One of our kids had pervasive rash with disposables, but she just has high maintenance skin. There is no doubt in my mind she'd have had rash with cloth diapers, too.) I can't bring myself to be intrinsically scared enough of diaper chemicals to blow off their dry-keeping powers.

So that's my experiment so far. I plan to stick with them on about a 3/4 basis (ie not overnight, for travel, or when we have company) because I have them and don't mind the extra work, but it is a big adjustment. I'm not really clear on why when you Google "cloth diapers" you turn up all these quotes about how people love them so much. This strikes me as another one of those things where the organic parenting community isn't being entirely forthcoming with the facts (cf natural childbirth, breastfeeding, etc.). I don't know why, since openness about the difficulty of these approaches makes self-righteousness that much easier. ;)

I'm so vain

I probably think this post is about me.

It's easy for me to think that I'm not that vain when I'm at what I consider my "normal" weight. This usually lasts from when whatever baby I'm on is 6 months old until I'm 2ish months pregnant with the next one. My clothes fit and that's as good as I'm ever going to look, so I don't think about it that much. (So I tell myself.)

Being visibly pregnant I just have to roll with--obviously I'm not going to win any beauty contests, but at least I have a legitimate reason for weighing more than my husband.

But the long transitions in between are when it becomes clear to me how vain I am. I'm always too scared to tell people we're pregnant until I'm out of the first tri, but the main thing that makes me want to tell anyway is so people won't think I'm getting fat. I refuse to buy clothes in sizes I deem unacceptable and just rely on loans from other people because I'm too vain to have such high numbers in my closet, even though I spend a lot of time in them. I obsess about what size I'll be for various events over the course of my endless gravitational journey (Huge pregnant for sister's wedding--avoid pictures. Should be skinny for brother's wedding--yay!). Am I vain? Oh yeah.

Just another example of how perpetual parturition is a useful spiritual exercise. Sometimes feeding the flesh is what mortifies it.

Another of my unresolved issues

So I’m supposed to be writing an article for our church’s May newsletter, but I got hung up on nomenclature. I was trying to be inclusive of mothers who work outside the home as well as those who don’t, and I was reminded of how annoyed I am about the lack of a proper job title. I’ve never resolved this to my satisfaction. I mean, what am I supposed to put on my business cards? “Housewife”—sooo 50s. “Homemaker”—well, that’s a little better, but I feel like it represents me as more domestically gifted than I actually am. “Stay-at-home-mom”—don’t remind me of how trapped I feel in this house right now! (Or, when the kids get a little older and need to be carted all over creation, that one will take on an ironic twist). “A mom who doesn’t work outside the home” seems like an underachiever who can’t pull off the double duty done by many women.

So when I hang out my shingle, what title should be engraved on it? I think Rebekah’s mentioned that her official title is “Minister of the Interior." That’s pretty good. I’ve also heard “Domestic Engineer,” which has potential, although I’ve never been really good at math, so I’d feel rather fraudulent in claiming that one. Part of the problem is that after the last couple of weeks, the only ideas I have for descriptions of what I do would be things like Zookeeper or Sergeant-at-Arms. Or maybe Bouncer Extraordinaire (of bawling baby as well as brawling brothers).

Help me out here?

Bleeding the beast

(as they say in the FLDS)

I got this in the mail. I don't remember applying for it, although it says I did.



That's right, folks, watching TV is such a basic human right that the government is footing the bill for it. The letter also tells me where I can buy these newfangled converter boxes (assured to cost no less than $40 thanks to this ingenious plan), and four of the six places listed are Walmart. I guess that's to appease the evil conservatives. Please note, the average American household has at least two TVs.

While I personally disagree that huge government programs like universal health care benefit society, I can at least understand the reasons that make other people want them. But TV upgrades? For real?

If I Ebay these things, I bet I'll actually come out ahead. Maybe I shouldn't complain.

Update: That's illegal! Back to complaining!

How to get a toddler to eat vegetables

Glenda is worried about vegetables, which reminded me that I've been meaning to share a trick. The best way to get un-cheesed vegetables into Dad is with a salad (and he only like homemade vinaigrettes, so even the dressing cost and calorie count is low). I can't deal with the babies eating salad; it's too messy and my almost 2-yr-old won't touch anything green on her plate. Making salad is a time consuming pain in the neck (budget and quality standards preclude the pre-bagged kind), so I usually do it in the morning after breakfast when the baby is still in a good mood. Here's the trick part: the kids think it's some kind of treat to eat the leavings. They all stand around anxiously, waiting for me to toss them a romaine rib, a broccoli stump, the end of a carrot, etc--even Little Miss Too Cool To Eat Vegetables. They eat a LOT of vegetables this way. ???

I don't know if other kids would fall for this, but I rely heavily on this method, so it didn't seem right not to tell you.

Playing chicken with my conscience

Rebekah’s post on her new, green-glam shopping bag sparked some sort of reaction in the random firing of neurons that passes for postpartum thought, resulting in me recalling a statement from Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons:

“Cheap chicken is not worth a compromised conscience.”

Obviously, he was stumping for chicken rights: Buy free-range, organic chickens, preferably purchased from local farmers, rather than the ones that lived what were undoubtedly nasty, brutish, short, and unnatural lives before ending up in Hy-Vee’s cooler case.

Now, it’s been awhile since I read the book, but I recall it as compelling. Life-changing, even. But some of his arguments caused me significant angst, which I could not resolve to my satisfaction and therefore dealt with through the ever-healthy psychological technique of repression. Well, not quite. But it’s true that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with some of the information, and with cheap chicken hanging on my conscience, I thought maybe y’all could help me out here.

More particularly, the crunchy lifestyle Dreher so passionately and (to me) convincingly advocates seems inevitably to collide with the CSPP gig, particularly for those of us raising families on one more-or-less fixed income. I can’t speak definitively about his position on this, but the gist as I perceived it was that although humans are indeed foremost among God’s creation, stewardship means that concern for creation might limit family size to the point where you can afford to live in a responsibly crunchy way. So: what’s a good response to this?

Again, I’m remembering this through a haze of time and hormones (postpartum as well as those ingested from all the nonorganic food I’ve consumed), so I can’t recall precisely why I found this so compelling—but he makes a good case, and I think there is a tension here.

But for now, if you see a store advertising the 79-cents-a-pound sale on chicken, you'll find me there, buying one for the week and one for the freezer.

I know this general topic has more or less been kicked around on this blog before, and I’m resigned to, as usual, doing what we can with what we’ve got. But that cheap chicken suddenly got heavy around my neck again when I recalled the Dreher quote…

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look'st thou so?' -"With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.”

-and-

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Bag lady

Check out my sweet new grocery bag from my favorite store:


My favorite thing about it, aside from its spacious interior and $1.99 price tag, is the pro-capitalist message couched in environmentalist terms and symbols, which pretty much sums up my approach to ecology. (Apologies to genuinely crunchy bloggers and readers! Ha!)

I know not all of you are fortunate enough to have an Aldi, so here's a related project to cheer you up.