Ahhhhh. Realized that I inadvertently took a little blogging hiatus for the past few months being busy living the dream in the hazy heat of summer. I’ll admit, when OG first plopped out of me and into our lives I took one look at her and had instant panic that I would never truly be able just let loose and be carefree ever again. During pregnancy you can “prepare” for your kid to your heart’s content but you never really know what life is going to be like until said kid is wailing away and thrashing on your lap or putting their hands down their poopy diaper and squishing what they find down there through their fingers… So while I can say that I was “ready” to take on the job of Mom by the horns and ride it bareback throughout the next 18 years when she was born I also had the teeny tiny pangs of buyer’s remorse when reality sunk in that sometimes the Mom job was going to majorly blow. But I’ve been mostly proven wrong, because we have had more fun together than I ever could have imagined, and truly had the best summer ever. Ever have one of those days/weekends/weeks where when it is winding down you think nostalgically back to right before all the fun started and wish that you could go back to that moment and live the whole thing over again? Yeah, this summer brought a whole mess of those. Trips up north to Hayward, Steven’s Point and Rapids, and Minocqua. Time spent in Racine and with our framily, early morning walks to the farmer’s market, meeting friend’s new babies, petting animals, swinging in swings, swimming whenever possible, bug bites and sunburns, catching fish and eating fish, sunsets (and a few sunrises but less than we were catching a few months ago PRAISE BE), eating new foods in new places with new people, drinking any IPA that came across our paths, gluttoning our way through state fair, golf for the boys and brunch for the girls, weddings and happy hours, teaching OG to perform tricks the same way we trained our dog, starting to get our house together for our eventual exodus to the burbs, our first plane ride as a family of 3 and the amazing Cape Cod adventure that it brought us, and more date nights than we even knew what to do with thanks to my in-laws love of sleepovers with babe. Seriously one of the best summers we’ve had! Wish we had more pictures to share… but like a stupid, stupid idiot I lost yet another phone to Milwaukee’s underbelly after a day of too much fun in the sun. RIP.

Sidebar: Perfect time for a cleanse of my contacts however, as sooooo many numbers didn’t backup to my “cloud” (whatever the heck that is) because I never learned how to use it despite this same problem happening to me countless times in the past. Can’t teach an old, lazy, unmotivated to maintain any semblance of a social life dog new tricks. And I find myself once again playing “who dat” whenever an unknown # texts me and I just play along like I know who I’m talking to. Only ever a problem when someone wants to make physical plans, otherwise I literally make no attempts to decipher who I am communicating with.

Anyway, this happy, balanced, easy stage of parenting that we are in didn’t just happen naturally. Despite our fervent promises to each other, made while rubbing my growing belly and imagining the perfect angel developing within that we were going to co-parent equally, as life moved along and routine and ease took precedent over those goals we swore we would strive to meet once she was born, we suddenly found ourselves bathing in our separate pools of traditional gender roles… splish splash dada whistles his way off to work before the demon awakens and wanders in sometime in the evening after demon is sleeping, debates working out vs catching up on the shows he actually finds time to watch on the DVR, eats a relaxing dinner (prepared by wifey) on the couch, and then is actually able to read the magazines that he subscribes to before heading up to bed. Meanwhile, in the same household on the same day…  splish splash dada leaves for work and as soon as the door hits him in the ass on the way out, spawn awakens for the day.  Mama somehow manages to get herself ready for work while feeding, changing, playing with, entertaining, and singing to the baby, simultaneously packing her lunch, the baby’s lunch, the baby’s daycare bag, getting laundry started and bottles sterilized, buying toilet paper and making baby food for the week and also grown up food for the week, reading up on baby milestones and activities she should have started with baby months ago, clipping formula coupons and checking sale prices for the week, picking dog hair out of the baby’s mouth, finding clearance seasonal baby clothes in the anticipated size for next year, making and taking baby to pediatrician appointments, wondering if that day’s birth control pill had been taken, driving 30 miles round trip and rescuing baby’s favorite toy from a gas station parking lot after realizing it had been chucked out the window during a fuel stop, researching preschools and Montessori schools and school districts and even homeschooling but then immediately deciding no way in hell for that one,  calmly handling car seat enveloping blow outs, planning for the worst, hoping for the best, etc etc… And that is just the morning. Then sitting an hour in traffic to get the baby to the sitter’s, and then the work day begins. I don’t need to go on, at least one of you reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about. And one day I lifted my head up from all of these tasks that I had found myself solely responsible for and was feeling more and more stressed and alone by the minute and said…NOPE. And that evening, over a lovingly prepared dinner I asked Gates to please name all of the ways that his life had changed since having OG, and after he reminisced about sleeping through the night and never having changed a diaper I listed all of the aforementioned duties (and plenty other ones) that I had strapped to my back and started carrying up a never ending hill like I was a sad donkey attending a donkey party of one and said NO MAS. Luckily for me, Gates knows that if I’m initiating a serious discussion, sh*t must be bad, because he snapped into line quicker than a donkey attending a donkey party getting attacked by bees could run, and Mama life has improved immensely. I love my daughter, but I was not made for full time, solo parenting. I would never have agreed to babyville if we hadn’t promised to split the duties, so I am grateful beyond belief that (even though it took a little prompting) Gates has stepped up to tackle his share of the bs parts of raising a baby. The biggest reliefs for me being: 1) he does the daycare shuffle one day a week and gets to rot in traffic with an angry baby for 1 hour each way, and I don’t start work until 11 am those mornings so I get to take a shower that lasts for longer than 20 seconds and read the news or a book, or watch Netflix, or just sit and enjoy the silence, and sometimes even eat breakfast before I have to head out the door. And then 2) He is now the boss of sleeptime whenever he is home. I just had always assumed that Olivia wasn’t a good napper/sleeper/etc because she would rather be a part of what was going on than snooze and therefore was determined to fight to the death before succumbing to one ounce of sleep.

After watching with anger and jealousy and frustration that OG will go down without a peep for bedtime and sometimes up to 2 hour naps for her babysitter, grandparents, and other caregivers, but with neither go down to bed for me or for a nap for longer than 20 minutes after a fight and struggle and screams and tears for usually 2-3 hours and feeling totally useless and terrible in the parental department I finally just realized that it WAS me, for whatever reason, and it is just not in the cards right now that I should be putting the kid down to sleep if we can avoid it. Apparently this isn’t a unique problem, as a quick google search confirmed. I’m telling myself it’s because she is obsessed with me and wants to hang with me, but probably it’s more that she can sense that I am beyond stressed and anxious and frustrated even before we fully jump into the naptime ritual dance routine. So now Papa Bear gets to rockabye baby and I get to punch out off duty for a little bit at the end of the night and I am pretty sure all of us are better for it.

We finished swim lessons for the season and I have to say I think they were worth every pretty penny. The class is repetitive each week, with specific songs to go along with the swim activity – belly swimming, back kicks, blowing bubbles, etc, and there is this one song where we sit the babies on this large floating duck mat and spin it around and sing this song about Mr. Duck where then on the count of 1, 2, 3! we dunk the babies underwater and they come up all spluttery and wide eyed and totally shocked by our betrayal. By the first month of classes all of the babies were totally conditioned to panic when they saw Mr. Duck and heard the opening words of the dunking song to the point where half the class was sobbing and clutching their caregiver and thrashing around and refusing to sit on the mat… it kind of sounds horrific the way I’m describing it but it was hilarious. Hilarious. Olivia wouldn’t full on sob but definitely would turn her head towards me slowly a’la Stewie Griffin –

– and keep her face exactly like that from the start of the song until she emerged from the water, eyes never leaving mine. Mad. As. Hell. So I can’t confirm if she learned to close her eyes underwater at all but she definitely learned to hold her breath for the dunking. And we also made friends with a couple in the group with a 1 year old! Bonus! Sometimes it’s hard to make Mommy friends that you actually want to spend time with, but I knew this girl was legit when she texted me one day and asked if I wanted to plan a trip to the zoo with her where we “smuggled beers in on the bottom of the stroller”… #BFF.

Olivia is on the move like no other and zips around the house like a little centipede. She’s fast as hell, despite her penchant for dragging her left leg behind her like (literally cannot believe that this is a second Family Guy reference in one post but it is also extremely accurate) that gimpy dog that belongs to that old perverted man on Family Guy:

Especially since our own gimpy creature is often found with her tongue flopping about like such:

She loves to examine (and eat if I am not quick enough to stop her) every single speck she finds on the floor, anything from a small blade of grass to a dried up dead spider, and shrieks in irritation if I pry her “snacks” out of her little paws. She also has developed a sassy habit of smacking my hand quite aggressively when I’m coming at her with a spoonful of whatever I’m shoveling down her gullet for a meal when she is done eating as a way of telling me she is full. Then she will cackle meanly when I say “NO!” after the food has splattered all over both of us. She does the same evil cackle when she passes gas loudly, and has taken to lifting one leg up while doing it to really give them some volume.

She also is absolutely terrified of the sound of landline telephones ringing and will instantly freeze from whatever she is doing, her eyes wide in terror, as the phone begins it deadly assault on her ear holes. If we don’t rescue her in time and stop the horror, she will start with the tears.

Would be heartbreaking if it wasn’t so funny. Speaking of her ears I get the bad mom award for indulging her with the occasional q-tip swab in her little piggy ears; 1) because she is a waxy beast and starts to get some drippage, and 2) I can’t get enough of the look of pure ecstasy on her face when the q-tip tickles her ear canals:

Time is flying exactly as they said it would, but so excited to be welcoming fall, Packer football, and cooler temps! Next up: farmer’s markets galore, an art fair, music hours at the library, football Sundays, a family photo session, pumpkin patching, zoo trips, jumping in leaves, drinking pumpkin lagers, hooded sweatshirts, campfires, making OG pose in some ridiculous Halloween costume, and somebunny turning 1 year old!

Little miss 10 month old! Climbing on everything and smiling at everyone and clapping for herself constantly because she is just the best!

She definitely keeps us on our toes, this darling sassy squid!

 

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PPS: if you’ve been looking for some reading material (***POTTY MOUTH LANGUAGE ALERT***):

Yup.