Christmas Magic

We have our iconic Christmas Magic photo captured above. We usually get some good Hannukah ones as well, but we were both too busy trying to keep Simon from catching fire to snap a photo. Good thing we have 7 more nights to try!

This says it all

Here's how we wind down before bed: we turn Sadie upside down and run around in circles. She loves it; we are convinced it helps her sleep. There have been no long-term studies on the effects of this on small children. We like to call it "fun."

Actually, both the kids are very physical these days. Simon can walk about 3 steps before falling and Sadie likes to jump on our stomachs and backs and legs. It's all quite cardiovascular and as soon as there is a Groupon for full-body physical therapy, I am signing up. I didn't realize how physical this was all going to get. We are all covered in bruises, but at least I think my kids are getting plenty of my physical attention.

In other news, our friend the mouse is back in the house. I have seen her and so has Jeff. I am sure the little critter is just trying to escape the cold, but I wish she would take up with our neighbors. How much do I NOT want to have to kill one of God's creatures during Advent? On the other hand, how much do I want to be able to come and go into my kitchen without fearing I am wrecking the set of Ratatouille? I have to say that if I was a late-night grazer and wanted to stop, I would get myself a mouse because it's really no fun to eat peanut butter standing up wondering if a mouse is about to run across your feet. So that's my diet tip for this New Year: Get a mouse and you will stay out of the kitchen.

Other causes for celebration:

• Simon has slept past 5:55 a.m. on more than 3 occasions. Praise Allah!
• The holiday shopping is almost done and neither of my kids understand presents, or holidays or Santa, which means no long, annoying lists of Disney crap they want (and won't get).
• Jeff's travels are winding down for the year, which means I don't have to put both kids to bed alone again during 2011. Better than Louis Vuitton.
• We are narrowing down our school search, which means the home schooling, as Plan B, has moved to Plan C.
• We surrendered on the topic of getting the perfect holiday picture and made a perfectly lovely holiday card that is en route to our house presently. We will get those out before Arbor Day after all.
• We have taught Sadie how to say prayers at night, which we have defined as sending good thoughts and kind words to people we love or those who might need it. It's my favorite time of night. She loves to say her prayers and then we put our hands together under our chin and say, "Amen," together. Cutest. Thing. Ever. It gives me a chance to remind her how big of our world is, how full of love it is, how easy it is to send love to others and how thinking about other people we love at the end of the day is a very soothing ritual. Next year we can work on praying for the people we don't like very much.
  

Holiday Card

We have tried three more times to get a holiday card picture and everytime Sadie ends up in meltdown mode and Simon craps his pants. At this rate, we are going to be sending out a holiday card for the ever auspicious Arbor Day 2012. How hard could it be to get two children under the age of 3 to look at a camera and smile at the same time? Maybe I will post the outtakes. Hell, maybe we'll do a card full of outtakes and we'll have the theme of "Keeping It Real," and we can let people know that they shouldn't feel bad that their children are messy and uncontrollable, because, hey, have you seen the Tate-Ellis Christmas card?

Yuletide

Sadie and I went on a little excursion to the Loop yesterday and we ducked into a couple of buildings to take some snaps of my favorite little elfette.

She wears a size 2T clothes, but her hats are extra large, for obvious reasons. Sadie is enjoying having a Christmas tree in our house and I am sure she will enjoy lighting the Hannukah lights. (She's pretty in to fire, which is only slightly concerning to us at this point.)

Award Season

They should award Nobel Prizes to moms. To moms like me who do such selfless acts to further peace in the world, such as letting the nanny go home 40 minutes early. I should totally be in the running for this prize. Because what I think my motherhood experience is missing is the dazzling bit of pizazz that comes with awards and honors and ribbons and glory and recognition.

Wait. There is none of that for moms. Maybe I am in the wrong line of work.

I guess I will settle for having a wonderful experience spending time with my children on a daily basis. My dividends will pay off when I don't have to visit them on family day at the Cook County jail or spend their college savings on The Promises in Malibu so they can get sober with Lindsey Lohan or Brooke Mueller.

Actually, there is no guarantee for that either. I don't think science has figured out what makes someone addicted to drugs or alcohol, but if all it took to prevent that was having a semi-sane parent staying home during these formative years, I bet more people would do it if they could financially. They may end up at Ivy League colleges pounding beers and escaping pain that I know nothing about. Then again, they may skip those annoying 4 years of college to pursue a passion like culinary arts or ski instruction. The point is that I don't know what the future holds and 15 years is a long way away.

What I do know is that today was a great day, full of all the connections and activity beyond anything I could have dreamed of when I was toiling away at my former law firm (or staring out the window while "doing" document review or preparing interrogatories). Sadie and I went to visit my friend Trish for a little playdate, which Sadie thoroughly enjoyed as she sampled every single starch in Trish's pantry. On the way home, she kept asking me why she had flax seeds on her hands. I tried to explain that one of the many, many crackers she nibbled on during our visit was full of seeds that she could eat off her hands if she wanted. How there was any room in her stomach after eating cheddar bunnies, aramath crackers, water crackers, rice puffs, flax crackers and her own stockpile of raisins and peanut butter crackers is beyond me.

Then I took Simon to have his follow up appointment to verify that his ear infection has healed and followed that up with a lunch with another friend, Joyce. Simon is a really great 10-month-old dining partner. He likes to look around, take a few bites of food and smile at everyone. That he knocked over a big glass of ice water was really my fault.

I got to put both kids down for their naps. They are napping now. (Hence, the nanny early dismissal.) I am watching the sun start to sink down its wintery path that will leave us in darkness at about 4:30 p.m.

And, it's ok. We are going to have a quiet night here. We are going to play and have dinner and read books. Mommy will probably lay on the floor and see if the kids will just play nicely and quietly around her prone body. Then, they will be in bed and I will have had this day. This day, the prize that is all mine. It could all go to shit later and both kids could cry and whine from 5-8 p.m., but right now, as they lay sleeping and gathering energy for their afternoon assault, I can see a kind of perfection in this day that is what I was hoping to find when I left my job 10 months ago. As everyone else already knows, I only get today, so whether my future holds Swarthmore or DeVry or a stripper pole or anger management classes -- and let's be clear, any of those could be for me or for them-- I have today in my hands and am grateful for the chance to pause and appreciate all that I have.

Bad Romance

When I hear Lady Gaga's Bad Romance (and for those of you who frequent spin classes, you cannot avoid it), I think of my breast milk. And my breast pump. And, we are in a bad romance.

Let's review: "I want your ugly, I want your disease/I want your everything as long as it's free."

That's me with the breast pump in a pop music nutshell. From the beginning, I was pumping like mad because I thought I was going back to my firm and I didn't want to worry about supply issues. Then, I kept pumping because of habit, duty, psychosis, the calorie burn, and fear about supply. Even when I decided not to return to work, I kept on pumping at least twice a day because (1) I knew I had the milk so why let it go to waste and (2) I often missed feedings when I was out with Sadie so I had to come home and pump for those missed feedings.

Well, let's just say that I was a little OCD about it. Every now and then my friends or Jeff might casually inquire about why I was pumping so much when I was pretty much a stay-at-home mom. I couldn't articulate it (probably because it's hard to make crazy sound sane), but I knew I couldn't stop. The whole enterprise took on moral and Biblical implications. I felt it was somehow immoral to not pump those extra 5 ounces I got in the morning. They were just sitting there in my breasts and everyone knows breast milk is like gold. How could I just stop pumping? What kind of mother does that?

I kept pumping. Soon, our reluctant sleeper, Simon, started to sleep through the night, which meant that the 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. feedings were consolidated into his 5:00 a.m. feeding, which we still do to this bleary-eyed day. I had a vague idea that my milk stockpile was pretty large, but I never really concentrated on that part of the freezer. I was more interested in the part of the freezer where I kept the ice cream and the frozen brownies.

About 4 weeks ago, I realized that some of my milk is going to expire. I have very carefully dated each bag of milk in the freezer and some of them bear June dates. The guidelines for keeping breast milk in the freezer vary, but generally six months is the outer limit of when it's still considered good nutrition for a baby to have defrosted breast milk. A friend told me about a young mother with "supply issues" (meaning she wasn't producing enough milk for her baby) and I decided to donate my milk. I felt afraid about letting my precious milk go, but the thought of it expiring and going to waste when a little baby out in the world could have it literally make me ill. I spent some time in the milk area of the freezer and separated all the milk by month. I had roughly 100 ounces I was willing to donate to my friend's friend, who actually ended up declining the milk because she was wary about the anti-depressant I am taking.

I tried not to feel rejected or ashamed that I take a low dose (I had to throw in there that it was "low" to mitigate the shame; and it really is low) of an anti-depressant that I started taking when I was a few weeks post-partum with both kids. I don't drink caffeine or alcohol or any non-approved FDA substances, but understandably some moms are nervous about medications. Another mother passed on it for similar reasons. I wish the well and feel grateful that I didn't have supply issues. Well, I do have supply issues, but the issue isn't low supply.

The issue is now I have about 100 ounces of milk in my freezer and it's going to expire soon. All year long Jeff has said that Thanksgiving weekend I can stop pumping. By his calculation, with our extra supply and Simon approaching the one-year mark (when babies are allowed to drink cow's milk so we won't have to rely on formula), I won't need to do that extra pump in the morning. I have been willing to let that go, and it feels really good. With those extra 40 minutes, I have spent more time dancing with Sadie, cuddling with Simon and hiding from both of them in the shower when I wanted to be alone.

But I am still addicted to the pump and sense of control I feel using it, which has been the irresistable draw of the pump in the first place. Why? Because breast feeding is so fucking hard, mostly because even after my boobs no longer hurt through every feeding and I accepted the fact that I couldn't really cavort around town with no sense of time because I would need to feed Simon, I still couldn't control one god-damned thing about nursing. I, like every other breast feeder, never knew if Simon was getting enough. Yes, he was in the 90th percentile for weight, but I couldn't measure it and tell feeding after feeding and day after day. I never knew if a day's fussiness was because of low supply or because I had extra brussel sprouts the day before. I didn't know anything. I hated that most of all, so I enlisted the pump give me a sense of control. I can measure what comes out of the pump. Every bottle has little hatch marks to show me each half an ounce. I can sit on my bed and listen to the wheeze of the pump and watch the drops turn into ounces turning into a bottle that Simon can drink. I have no idea what really happens when he's hanging out on my breast every morning from 5:00 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. In part, I don't know because I am half asleep, and many times, so is he.

I couldn't have done the breastfeeding for this long (and I intend to keep going, one day at a time) without the pump. It afforded me opportunities to sleep and to go places with Sadie while Simon got to nap. It helped me endure some of the tedium that is having a newborn baby. And an infant. It helped me take bottles of breast milk in the few places where I wasn't comfortable nursing.

It's a seriously miraculous invention of the modern world.

And, when I look at my freezer I can see that I quite possibly took it a little too far. A stay-at-home mom does not need a freezer full of 200 ounces of milk, the bags of which will expire one by one starting Sunday. I am not sure I could have forgiven myself for NOT pumping had I encountered supply issues, but I am finding it hard to forgive myself for pumping like a maniac and ending up with milk that will be thrown out.

NOT Coming to a mailbox near you

We tried. We had the matching outfits. We had the camera ready to go. We all had naps. But this photo shot was not meant to be "the One." We were working on the holiday card, but at the end of about a 12-minute period, both kids ended up in their diapers chasing each other around the living room.
We have to try again this weekend. I was hoping to be mailing out some photo magic as soon as Monday, but the train has been delayed. By god, if it takes me until May, I will get my picture. There's nothing wrong with a sweet little Memorial day greeting from the Ellis family.
Yes. It was just wasn't happening.