Catching Up

1. The sonogram went great. Great as in she totally charmed both nurses and was a general ham the entire time. She even tried to work the sonogram machine herself. What a character this girl is!

2. The results. Everything is fine.

3. The other results. She has some extra kidney (whathuh??). Not an extra kidney. Some extra kidney. On her left side. It's called a bifid renal pelvis, and our doc says that it's a "totally normal variance that should have no affect on anything whatsoever." When we got the news, I tried to focus on the positive spins, like "my daughter's kidney is so awesome her body decided to make a little extra." It worked. Kind of.

4. They also saw a teeny tiny cyst on her ovary (my baby has ovaries?? I mean, I know she does . . . it's just weird to think about a 10-month-old's ovaries). Also normal, apparently, in breastfed babies. It's a result of the hormones she's still getting from me. It should go away once she's weaned. Huh.

5. I'm not a big fan of all the stuff they find when they go looking for something else. Another reason those whole body scan things are probably not a good idea. The saying "ignorance is bliss" is rooted in solid philosophical truth.

6. We've had a crazy busy summer. We've either been traveling or having people visiting us pretty much every other weekend for two months now. On the weekends we are actually at home, alone, we spend so much time trying to catch up from the previous weekend and prepare for the next weekend that there's not a lot of time left for anything resembling a calm, relaxing life together. So we're taking the entire month of August off. No family visits. No traveling. Nada. Puttin' up the "Closed for Business" sign. Adios. Time to focus on just us, and spending time together, and hanging out with our friends (if we still have any left after being totally MIA for months). This coming weekend is our first weekend of our month off and I'm already giddy with excitement.

7. My IL's were not happy to hear about our month-off plan. They said that they were going to come visit my BIL (who lives about 20 minutes from us), and "of course you'll see us if we're in town, right?" Um. No. I think you're missing the point. YOU PEOPLE ARE DRIVING US CRAZY. You don't get to "get around" our boundary by trying some passive aggressive, underhanded, indirect way of visiting us without actually staying with us. We told them, encouraged them, to come and visit BIL. And that we would see them if we didn't have plans. Guess what? I can already tell you we'll have plans. Whenever it is. We have plans.

8. My MIL already bought baby girl a potty-training seat. She asked me last weekend if I thought it was too early to start using it.

9. I should start a blog just devoted to documenting all the crazy shit my ILs do. I could make millions by selling the memoirs. It would be like the Russian Jewish version of Everybody Loves Raymond.

10. I'm pretty sure they'd be offended by the contents. Maybe then we could get some time off from their visits.

11. Work has sucked this summer. I was supposed to be in charge of one project. I've been in charge of three projects. All of which have been their own unique clusterfuck. (Hello, no time to blog at work!) It's amazing how much stress at work affects how much I'm able to pump at work. Luckily I've been really successful at not really caring how much I pump at work. I worked really hard (woke up to pump at midnight for SIX MONTHS, remember?) to build our freezer stash, and she's got plenty of milk to go on. Even if I weaned her today, she'd still get nothing but breastmilk well beyond 12 months. So it sucks to have work negatively impacting my supply, but it's great that all my hard work in the beginning is paying off so well now. Aces.

12. On breastfeeding. I'm still doing it! My daughter is almost 11 months old and I'm still nursing her! I can't tell you how amazed and joyful I feel about this. When I had her, we had such a hard time getting started. She was so slow to gain weight. She was such a slow eater. I told myself I'd be happy if we made it three months, and ecstatic if we made it to six. I told myself just to make it 'til I went back to work, because pumping is such a game changer. And then everything just kept going along just fine. My new goal was nine months. Then once we hit 10, I just stopped setting goals. Even if she self-weaned at 10 months, I would have been satisfied with the job we did. But here we are. Approaching 11. Still going strong. Almost an entire year of breastfeeding while being a working, pumping mom. I. am. thrilled. !!!

13. In other aspects of feeding, she's almost entirely off purees now. On the one hand, yay, what a big girl! On the other hand, uggghhhhh. Purees were so easy. I could make several batches on the weekend and just freeze them into serving-sized chunks. Grab a few out of the freezer and voila! Meal. Done. No mess, no fuss. But now with finger foods, real food, I have to constantly worry about having fresh food on hand. It's hard, yo.

14. Baby girl's favorite veggie: green beans, followed closely by black beans (are those even veggies? meats??). Favorite meal: spaghetti with meat sauce. She loves anything with lots and lots of flavor--shredded chicken with mild pico de gallo, pasta in pepper cream sauce. She is definitely her mother's daughter when it comes to food.

15. She picks up the spaghetti daintily, one noodle at a time. But then when she gets it to her mouth, she shoves her whole fist inside.

15. She is pulling up on everything, even things that have nothing to hold onto, like the front of the dishwasher. She is moving from furniture to furniture. She is walking behind her lion-walker thing. We are relishing these last few days/weeks of non-walking. Rel-ish-ing.

16. She said her first word! "Book." You'd better believe this former English-teacher-turned-editor mommy's heart just about burst. She also said her second word. "No!" Or really, "Nonononono!!!" accompanied by a vigorous shaking of her head. We get this when we offer her a food she doesn't want, when she's pointing to something she wants and we guess wrong, when we try to do something (put her down, take a toy) that she doesn't like. There was considerably less heart-bursting going on with the second word.

17. She's signing "all done" when she finishes her meals and when we get to the end of her books.

18. Remember how she makes the "Ah!" sound after she drinks (or nurses)? She now makes the "Ah!" sound when she's thirsty and is asking for water. Does that count as her third word?

19. This month. Freaking amazing. Communication. Mobility. Real food. Good bye, baby. Hello, almost toddler. I was looking at some of her itty-bitty pictures, and for the first time, instead of relief that we are out of that phase, felt a pang of nostalgia.

20. We want our kids to be relatively close in age. Our baby is almost one, almost not a baby anymore. I felt nostalgic when looking at her infant pictures. You'll never guess what that means . . .