Pay it forward...

Some of you may remember my Pay it Forward Exchange. Well I created a lovely green summer hat for WesnLani's chemo angel recipient, and I finished my second craft, a lovely black and shiny gold and silver evening bag for Mandy over at Not Another Mom Blog. I had a lot of fun creating this bag. I crocheted it out of 100% cotton yarn, with a sparkly deco yarn trim, lined it with a thick sparkly felt lining, and crocheted a clasp closure so it's contents won't spill easily out of it.

Here is the bag itself:

Here is the handcrafted enclosure:

Here is a detailed shot of the stripes:

It was a great deal of fun making this. It may be the fanciest one I have made yet. I think I may use this pattern again for christmas gifts.

Thanks for everyone who participated! I am sending the gifts out Monday.

Vice and Vices...

My head is stuck in a vice again.

The throbbing pain coupled with photophobia (light induced pain) makes it hard to write anything interesting. I am trying to fight off despair. I am so tired of dealing with migraines. I know I don't have a life threatening illness, and I am ever thankful for the mostly healthy life I have had, but I am still longing for a headache free life.

I mean seriously, who has time to sit still in a quiet dark room for days on end? If I had time to do that, I would be a member of the landed gentry, stuck in a whale boned corset, and forced to gorge on meals before leaving for parties in order to maintain the image that women eat like birds. (An asinine comparison, since birds eat more than their weight each day, and therefore a woman eating like a bird would be consuming over a hundred pounds of food daily. I digress.)

I have suffered from these nasty, soul sucking, headaches since I was twelve. In fact, this year marks the 20th anniversary of my introduction to migraine hell! Bully for me! Two decades of intense headaches coming and going, sometimes a few a year, other times a few a month.
I have gone to work and class in sunglasses, lived with a permanent prescription for percoset and muscle relaxants, and worn earplugs when watching my kids play. I have tried yoga, massage, chiropractic treatments, diet and vitamin changes, heat therapy, cold therapy, herbal therapy, swimming, walking, sleeping, drinking, lying in a dark room, working through the pain, sex, and more. I have had dozens of C.T.'s and MRI's, not to mention the plethora of EMG's and nerve conduction survey's I have been treated to. I can't even explain the other myriads of medical brain and nerve scanning technologies I have been treated with over the years.

I have been told they were caused by stress, hormones, insufficient bra support, birth control medication, allergies, the manner in which I carry my children/backpack/purse, diet. You name it, I have been given a reason. I have even been told to get breast reduction surgery on the off chance it will improve my headaches. (Cause yeah, medical science is down to a science, there ain't no guess work in them there diagnoses.)

What I haven't been given, is a solution. Each time I try a remedy, I get hopeful. I think maybe this time I am done. Each time I have a month, or two, sometimes even several months, without headaches. Each time they return. The only time I have been successful in getting rid of them is when I am pregnant. As much as I enjoy the lack of migraine's while enciente, I am certainly not going to be pregnant forever. (That would be another nightmare entirely.)

I refuse to let these headache's ruin my life, so over the years I have adapted to living with a certain amount of discomfort. I buy ridiculously huge dark sunglasses to wear in and out of the house, I take medication to dull the ache, and I live my life.

I know my family can still tell when I am having one. Monkey will come to me and pat my head and say "I am sorry you hurt mama." Lee will make me tea and rub my shoulders. I wish I could live my life with as much zest as normal, but at least I am up and about.

And today, I am blogging. Which has become one of my vices. I am pretty sure I could be at death's door in the ER and still would ask for a laptop and wireless connection so I could connect with the blog-o-sphere. It's better for you than most vices, I won't get lung cancer or destroy my liver by blogging, though carpal tunnel is certainly a risk. At least I can socialize with someone, without having to explain that smiling makes my head hurt.
Thanks for being there to socialize with.

My Nine Jobs...

I am job hunting, looking for that fabled "what I am going to be when I grow up."
It is not an easy thing to do. I look at job descriptions and think, is that really me? Do I fit that? Can I do that? What if I can do most of it?

It is an odd time, full of doubts and insecurities. Especially since I don't really want to succeed at it. I want to stay home snuggled up with my baby, nursing and fully embracing his youngest years. Why doesn't Stay at Home Parent pay anything? It should, I certainly fill enough roles. At the very minimum, I should be able to list some of my responsibilities on my resume, it's not as if I have been sitting at home eating bon-bons for the last year.

I wonder what I would earn if I was doing all my jobs outside the home, instead of inside it?

Let's see.... In order to get an idea of what my time is worth, I went to Salary.com and looked up the various jobs I do within my zip code. According to the midrange salaries for the various positions, I should be a wealthy woman:

Housekeeper
$22,000.00 year

Chef (Fast Food Cook)
$33,000.00 year

In home Nurse
$50,000.00 year

Personal Assistant
$45,000.00 year

Secretary
$35,000.00 year

Chauffeur
$35,000.00 year

Nutritionist
$58,000.00 year

Teacher
$30,000.00 year

Day Care Provider
$30,000.00 year

Obviously I can't do all these full time, so let's assume I am only doing them 1/3 as much as the professionals are (remember, I can't leave my job to go home, and working nine part time jobs is actually possible, if you are working 24/7). At 1/3 annual salary for each job, added together, I should earn approximately $109,000.00 a year.

Wow. The work I do at home is as valuable as the work I would do as a lawyer! Sadly, it doesn't pay in cash, only in drooly, sticky love. (Okay, and lots of hand made artwork.)

What does this financial revelation really mean? Well, maybe it means that all you stay at home parents out there who feel as though you "aren't contributing" to the household should rethink your definition of contribution. If you were to pay others to do what you do, you would have some pretty ridiculous bills.

Well, the boss is demanding my attention, so I am off to work! Here, why don't you enjoy an oft requested (by Hatchet anyway) video of Otter toddling while I go sweep up scattered and stepped on Goldfish:

And here he is saying Balloon (okay, his version of Balloon, which is really more of a "Bavvoonmn" sound):

Spare the crib, spoil thyself...

While taking my one year old son for a stroll a few days ago I stopped into my neighborhood coffee house. I noticed a woman with a similarly aged child sipping a coffee in the corner. We oohed and aahed over the babies and began to talk about our parenting experiences with the fervor of isolated stay at home parents.

"Are you still nursing?"
"Yes I am. It's just so convenient."
"Me too, you never have to worry about running out..."
"And it's always the right temperature!"
"Do you stay at home?"
"Yes, staying at home is so great."
"Yes, a little isolating, but very rewarding."

We enjoyed the instant friendship created by our shared experiences, thrilled to have a few minutes to share conversation with an adult in the middle of our child filled day.
She asked me if he was sleeping well at night, as her baby kept getting up around two a.m.
"He sleeps with me, so he gets up some, but I don't really notice." I informed her.
"You still sleep with him? You are spoiling him." She said in a sweet, caught you with a second slice of cake, voice.
"No way," I responded "I don't believe that for a second."
"You're right," she said smiling " you are spoiling yourself."

She's right. Like a great massage, or that sexy red pair of cuban heeled shoes, or a box of exclusive chocolates, snuggling up to my baby every night is a treat, and a way I can spoil myself. My daughter turns seven this year, so I know how quickly the baby time goes. I also am fairly certain this is my last child. So there is a part of me that snuggles up to him at night, warm and fuzzy in my bed, and feels like I am catching hold of as much of his chubby babyhood as possible.

For me, attachment parenting is mostly about getting the most out of my children's childhood as I can. There is also a big laziness component. I like not having to walk the floor for an hour to get my baby to sleep before setting him in his crib. I love not having to get up and heat water for formula when he wakes up hungry at 3 a.m. I like the extra sleep I get by popping a nipple in his mouth when he starts to stir. I don't have to be very awake to nurse him when we are sleeping side by side. I find slings easier to carry in my diaper bag than strollers. However, as important as these benefits are, the true reason behind my decision to co-sleep, nurse, and baby-wear, is the extra coziness of close contact with my baby.

The baby years seem so long when you are in the middle of them, but in reality they are so fleeting. They crawl before you can get the fog of motherhood out of your head, they walk before you can get used to them crawling, they start to talk about the time you are really understanding their non verbal cues. Suddenly they are two, and stridently demanding their first taste of freedom. Then they are going to school, and a part of their life is lived outside of you. The small precious baby who once required you for everything is suddenly a small person with their own friends, and experiences that you are no part of at all.

So I co-sleep, and nurse, and baby-wear, so I can keep my baby closer to me for just a bit longer.

Visit this post over at Attachment Parenting International's new blog API Speaks!

A few changes...

No, I have not adopted an ape and an otter, so if you have noticed the appearance of Monkey and Otter in recent posts, don't worry, the menagerie has not grown. After two years of blogging and reaching over 400 posts I finally decided to use nicknames for my children (because doing so at 100 posts would have been too easy).
I have been going back through posts and editing them to reflect the change. Why? I guess I felt the need to add a thin veneer of mystery to the sordid details of our lives. Okay, and I will also be posting a few times a month for Attachment Parenting International, on their API Speaks blog. I guess I figured that might result in some more traffic here, and since I will officially be leaving the land of "family update" blogs and entering the land of "some other type of blog" I feel the need for additional privacy. At least for the kids. Hubby is still fair game.

So, my first post should be up on API speaks soon, if you want to pop over and see it! I will be posting it here too, once it is up, so you can also just wait. However, if you go see it on their blog, then you can check out all their other cool contributors as well, so you might want to give it a go!

No weekly winners for me!

Instead, I got a totally stuffed up snotty baby with a high fever, a hyper active child with attention seeking behaviors, and a long weekend of stress. It was one of those kids all over you, never wanting to play alone or be set down kinda weekends. I am still twitching.

I had to cancel my weekly sanity break with my friends, because Otter is so sick he wants to nurse all the damn time. It sucked.

On the upside, an old friend came into the town and stopped over to see us. Lee held the grouchy man whilst I donned my new apron and made a nice pork tenderloin for dinner. Then Lee sent me out to grab dessert for everyone, as we don't normally carry sweets in the house, so I picked up Rum Raisin Gelato and Butter Cookies. They were pretty good.

Of course, when I returned, Otter was so traumatized by my leaving that I nursed him for another hour and a half before he would sleep.

I hope he gets over this soon. It is really intense. He doesn't want to do anything by lie in my lap and suck on me. I feel so dehydrated, and so... well... trapped. Ugh.

Tomorrow is a school holiday too... so it will be a whole day of bored six year old and sick baby.

Grant me patience please.