Pink Prickly Pear

Can you tell I'm procrastinating?

(And obviously the boy who gets into everything is asleep)

Road trip + cloth diapers = glutton for punishment?

There are laundry facilities at our destination, but we won't get there until the fourth day.  I usually wash our diapers every second day, so I think I'd need to spend a little more to pad our diaper stash to last longer.  Or I could just spend that money on disposables.

I hate to think of the boy sitting in that nasty gel for hours on end.  I'd hate to buy the kind without the nasty gel and have him leak all over his carseat.  Buying more cloth diapers will be a bit more expensive than a pack of 'sposies.

I should probably just pick the answer out of a hat. 

I should have planned a little further ahead and bought gently used dipes online.

Between my efforts to simultaneously rid our home of clutter while also procuring inexpensive second hand items of a temporary nature (ie. high chairs, baby gates and the like), I've spent a considerable amount of time online at places like craigslist and half.com.  People's descriptions are amusing, to say the least.

Someone, while attempting to put a positive spin on the condition of their copy of Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (I am scoping out the competition, not interested in aquiring another copy) noted that in addition to the "nice, tight spine" their copy had "useful underlinings and highlights".  Now, as anyone who's ever ended up with a marked up text knows, someone else's markings hardly ever correspond with what you probably find most pertinent.  Purely speaking for myself, I find other people's hot pink highlights and ill-formed marginalia most distracting.

A certain type of seller can't resist pointing out to potential purchasers how much they initially paid for an item.  I don't find this information useful, except perhaps in pointing out what a boob you were to spend $300 on a highchair you could have bought on craigslist for $50.

Seller's opinions don't hold much sway with me either.  I just want the facts (dimensions, condition, price), preferably accompanied by a good photograph.  I don't need to know how "cool and unique" you think the hidden cupholders are on your (IMO hideous) green corduroy couch.  Do alert me to its presence though, because there's a wealth unsaid in that detail - there are going to be crumbs galore in them there couch cushions, aren't there? 

Also, when taking a photograph, natural light is best.  The photo should be of the entire item, not just the un-stained portion.  You also might want to clean up your scruffy abode, or at the very least, crop it.

We started the day with a poo of such epic proportions that it required a bath.

I'm on my second load of laundry. 

Other than that, I'm having an excellent day.  No sarcasm intended.  Really.  The boy drifted off to sleep early and I ate last night's leftovers for brunch.  I also took a very long, very hot shower.  The new house is a bit rickety and beach-house-y, but we have a very large hot water tank (I know we're having a drought, but I figure since I shower less than the average bear, not to mention less than the average I-get-other-people's-bodily-fluids-on-me-frequently person, I get to take long ones when I do take them).  My shower was longer than that run-on sentence.  Much longer and smelling of lavender.

I'm organizing our downstairs space.  I reconfigured my desk and decided I needed to test the new spatial relationship between the monitor and the keyboard.  Might as well natter on here for a bit.  I also listed some books on half.com.  What books sell quickly?  Books on having babies.  What I am not having any more of?  Babies.  Money in my pocket.  Money I'm going to spend on some expensive organic baby sunscreen since my boy is fair, fair, fair.  Despite his layers and full body coverage, he managed to get a wee sunburn the other day on his wrists of all places.  The coverage of the burn is wee, the actual burn itself?  Horrible.  Not wee at all.

Do not email me and chastise me for letting the baby burn.  I'm his mother and feel terrible enough.  Do not email me telling me that sunscreen causes cancer.  Until I have researched this topic ad nauseum, I'm going to slather him with the stuff.

Decluttering.

Moving is the perfect excuse to lighten the load.  I've written before about how much I detest stuff, to the point where I'm convinced there is probably a medical name for the sense of dread I feel at things like overstuffed drawers and generously filled gift bags alike. 

I'm pretty good at getting rid of things.  I'm not as good at stemming the tide against things coming in.  I'm trying, though.  Here are my latest tricks in the ongoing battle:

When the mail arrives, I immediately tear the back cover off all unwanted catalogs before pitching them in the recycling.  When I get a minute I call the 800 number on the back and cancel the catalog.  The other day, I took 4 back covers in the car with us to karate.  While d'anjou napped, and mini-pear practiced her blocks and kicks, I canceled all four catalogs. 

I've also tried to stop rationalizing the need to pick up little brochures and other ephemera.  I tend to end up with little piles of museum postcards, flyers for classes/community events, etc.  As if I need proof that I was there or something.  For the most part, the same information is available on the internet.  I hope I spend less time filing stuff away or sorting and throwing away most items in an accumulated pile six months from now.

In which I find myself alone on a Sunday afternoon, with a baby NOT asleep on my chest...

Quick!  To the internets! 

I would say that I am as sick as a dog as is Mr. Pear, but I wonder where that saying comes from? When our dog gets sick, she just vomits wherever she likes and gets over it a.s.a.p.  As if she has places to be, visitors to host, x-mess pressies to wrap...

So two nights ago, I was the moan-y, groan-y one, but last night?  Last night I think I could have slept soundly were it not for the boy incessantly banging his head into me (his version of the squeaky wheel) and Mr. Pear's insistence on breathing through his nose, despite the fact that it was mostly stuffed up.  

*

Speaking of x-mess pressies (I was...a bit), I did the bulk of my shopping on the internet.  I was so proud of myself.  Ha ha!  No navigating mall parking lots in December, no snippy overworked sales ladies, none of that dehydrated feeling I get after spending too much time in an enclosed space with all that linty merchandise...

I was not that clever though...because I forgot that Mini-Pear needed black shoes for her choir performance.  I was sure we could accomplish this in a quick trip to the shopping center a few blocks away - there's a Target, one of those big shoe discount places, a TJMaxx, even a Payless if came down to it.  But they didn't have a thing.  You can't buy girls dress shoes at Target without Hello Kitty's face all over them and Mini-Pear was adamant about not getting "those really common ones with the glitter all over them".  None of the other places had anything that even came close to fitting the bill.

So that's how we found ourselves with one visitor-free morning in which to obtain a pair of shoes.  I decided we'd just bite the bullet and head to a massive upscale mall down towards San Diego.  We parked outside Nordstroms, noted that they had exactly what we were looking for (the most adorable little $209 Prada Mary Janes), but decided that we could find them for less in one of the other shops.  Except we were wrong.  Kids here wear flip-flops or go barefoot.  No, really, barefoot - like Little House on the Prairie.  Many's the playground conversation about how such and such got to Disneyland or the Doctor's office or Grandma's house, only to discover that the kids hadn't brought shoes with them.  Mini-pear tends to just keep her shoes in the car, which used to drive me crazy until I realised that when I did move them onto the shoe racks in the garage, she would inevitably forget to pick them up and, like all her little playmates, arrive at our destination shoeless.

We then spent the next two and a half hours trying to locate children's shoes, only to end up back at Nordstrom's sweaty, bedraggled, exhausted and willing to pay through the nose for whatever fit.  You know none of the other department stores even had kid shoe departments?  It's like even the retailers in southern California have given up on getting the kids to wear shoes! 

Our efficient Nordtrom's salesman (why, oh, why do I ever bother shopping elsewhere for things like shoes?) commiserated with us on Southern California's failures (lack of good food, incessant sun, no fucking kids shoe departments!), reminisced about the east coast (he's from South Jersey) and calmly fit Mini-Pear with a pair of reasonably priced sensible shoes (no Pradas until she's grown).

Yes, I reminisced for the east coast.  Something I find myself doing with frightening regularity these days.  My feet.  They itch.  My mouth?  Salivates for Chinese take out. 

Among other longings.

I want to be all done now.

This is what a good portion of my living room looks like at the moment. Re-organizing and purging our paper files is something I've put off for years.  I keep our file boxes in my bedroom, but foolishly thought that if I worked on this project in the middle of the living room, I'd be more inclined to complete said project in a timely fashion.

Ha!

Will someone please come and clean up for me?  Pretty please?  I've never seen so much shredded paperwork in my life.

Assembling my cloth diaper command center...

I woke up far too early this morning.  Once it became apparent that going back to sleep wasn't an option, I resolved to make a cup of tea and read my book.  I did get that cup of tea, but then I stupidly decided to "just check my email" while I ate my bagel.  And then I thought I'd just finish reading that cloth diaper FAQ and before you know it, the internet made that sucking sound and everyone was awake and there was no quiet time to sit and read my book that has nothing to do with pregnancy or cloth diapers.

Poo.  I suppose the good thing is I think I've caught up on "cloth diapering advances over the past 6 years".  A lot to wrap one's head around.  There are flushable, compostable diapers with little reusable cloth covers!  My preference is to just use cloth pre-folds and covers, but there is definitely a time and a place (road trips!  visits to bewildered non-cloth diapering friends and family!) for flushable, compostable diapers.

Every time I look at the prices on some of these cloth diapering options, I have to catch myself and remember just how fast little ones blow through a package of disposables.  At the end of the day, cloth is less expensive than disposables, except you're paying the bulk of it up front.  However, there are some very fancy, artsy fartsy, organic wool, vegetable dyed diapers with ridiculous prices I just can't quite fathom.  Sixty or seventy bucks!  Just because it has felted mushrooms or sunbeams or what-have-you embroidered on the bottom?

The good news is that cloth diapering is a massive cottage industry for work at home moms.  Aside from pre-folds (and I'm still on the hunt - I'll bet I can find some made stateside), it looks like everything I need is made right here in the U.S.A. and you can't say that about much of anything anymore.

The bad news is that I'm spoiled for choice.  Too many shopping choices makes my head spin, but I'll try not to complain about that, because I feel like I complain about this all-in my-own-head non-issue too much as it is.  Still, the other day, when someone gaily gushed about how I must be doing all the really fun shopping for cute baby stuff, I almost hired her to do it for me.

I don't really care about the cute baby stuff, I just want the cute baby!

Speaking of cute babies, are they not everywhere?  We went to the pool over the weekend and everyone and their mother seemed to have cute little roly-poly half nekkid babies with them.  Lucky for me, they (the babies) no longer burst into tears when I smile at them.  This seemed to be happening very consistently last year, possibly when my baby fever was at its highest, most unmanageable pitch.  I suspect I was giving off some sort of, "Hey kid, given half the chance, I just might bundle you under my shirt and take off running!" vibe.  These days, I get nothing but happy gurgly baby smiles.  They must sense my super lactation powers have been activated.  "Form of milk bar!"

Technologically speaking...

...this week's been an annoying one.

I tried to burn a CD only to have the drive on my computer decide to stop recognizing CDs.  Then it decided to recognize a Netflix DVD as a recordable CD.  After much cajoling I was able to persuade my computer to eject!  Eject! Eject!  and not record a play list over a film I don't own - but it's not supposed to be able to do that, right?

Now I can't even watch films on there;(  Lugging my iMac to the Apple store is a chore I don't need to add to my list.

Then computer also failed to recognize my iPod!  This on a night when I could not sleep and badly needed someone to talk me to sleep in the dark of my bedroom.  I'm reading a couple of really interesting books this week and I knew turning on the light for a little put-me-to-sleep reading was not going to work.  And then my little iPod radio/speaker thingy in my room refused to recognize my iPod and then my iPod decided it wasn't going to turn on or respond to me in any meaningful fashion.  The following morning, it inexplicably turned on with no explanation for its extremely bad behavior.  It's been acting up and I'll be so sad if this is the end.  Having an ancient vehicle with no CD player (let's not even talk about having a little mps docking station or whatever they call them), I rely on my iPod being hooked up to one of those little magnetic cassette thingies to save me from our backwater NPR station and commercial radio while driving all over the place (yes, we do spend a lot of time in the car here in SoCal).  Plus, all those nights when I can't sleep!  And all those classes I sit and wait outside, knitting, but needing someone to whisper news of the outside world into my ears!  Sometimes when I go to the podcast menu, it just turns off and I have to start it up all over again and scroll through the menus 2 or 3 times before it will actually let me listen to what I want to;(  iPod drama.  How ridiculous to get this bent out of shape about something I totally didn't need a couple of years ago.

I also needed to scan in some photos - something I've done on numerous occasions with no problem.  And nothing worked.  The programs that normally just capture the scanned image wouldn't do so.  Since at this point I was ready to rip my sleek little computer from the wall and hurl it at the wall, I decided to take the dog for a walk instead.

Then yesterday something happened to the internets.  Was it the wireless router?  Maybe, because I wasn't able to print my transposed knitting instructions out on our wireless printer.  Mr. Pear had to come home and wrangle with it.  It's a mystery to me.  The internet is back...somehow...and now the printer is hooked up the old fashioned way.  Knitting instructions printed.

I have knitty picks to share (teeny tiny little boy baby cardigan to make you say "Awwwww," and just for braggin', the beginnings of my very delicate lacy shawl), but I'm loathe to hook up my camera because you know something would happen and my pictures would all delete themselves from my camera card or my fancy new camera would explode.

I think I will just ignore all this stuff that supposedly makes my life easier and go sit on the beach today. 

Who's legs are those?

Having finally recently mastered the art of riding a bicycle, Mini-Pear discovered this pair of hand-me-down skates in the dwindling box of "clothes to be grown into".  It seems we've hit some point where we're not on anyone's radar anymore with regard to outgrown clothing.  Actually, I take that back.  We're not getting any clothing for Mini-Pear, but Mr. Pear's co-worker's wife is pregnant with her third child (first girl), so she sent Mr. Pear home with enough baby boy clothes for this baby* to wear a different outfit every single day for the first year of his life at least.  Very handy, since you all know how much I hate the shopping.

You know, it's not so much how I hate the shopping as how inept I am.  I wrote recently about a disappointing search for maternity clothes.  My mother, who needs no excuse to shop, immediately took this on as a project.  She arrived with a complete summer wardrobe for me.  Would you believe that everything fit, with the exception of one pair of shorts which felt just slightly too snug around the waist?  I mean, here I go into a shop, with the actual body in need of clothing, try a million and one things on and none of it fits, and all my mother seems to need to do is hold it up on the hanger and squint at it.  It's been years since clothing me was her responsibility and as I've waxed and waned considerably in this time, I find this no small feat.

But this is about Mini-Pear and skating, isn't it?  She started out awkwardly clomping around the back patio large before discovering that concrete paving stones separated by 2" wide avenues of pebbles are not the best surface for skating.  Now she awkwardly clomps along the sidewalk - decidedly less awkward when someone (in this case, it's her granddaddy) agrees to pull her along.  I made the mistake of telling her how fast one can go down a hill when all tucked up like a little egg.  She immediately crouched into the position and shot down the driveway towards the street.  I saved the day by shoving her into the flower bed.  She probably has a different opinion about that one...

* Oh hey, yeah, it's a boy!

Ahhh... Eh.

The other morning I called to Mr. Pear from the kitchen, "You can't stay in bed all morning!"

The fact that I was already up and in the kitchen before he got out of bed is noteworthy in and of itself.  Close readers know that this teenage mommy does not get out of bed until Mr. Pear brings her a hot cup of something.  However, I was feeling extraordinarily well rested and therefore, rose quite cheerily and made my own hot cup of tea and hot buttered crumpets (I brave the Trader Joes parking lot for these and these alone).

"Oi!  Pear!!!" I called a little louder.

"It's not going to give me bedsores!"

It's true.  We have a new bed and, among other things, the new bed is engineered not to give one bedsores.  We could lay in it all day long, every day, if we wanted to, to no ill effect.

It is not organic.  Nor is it a futon.  Nor is it king-sized, but it is some ultra-cushy Swedish memory foam that makes me conk out practically the minute my head hits the pillow (which is also new and made of that cushy Swedish memory foam).

However, I think it might be too comfortable.  I fall asleep immediately and don't move for hours.  This makes my muscles feel a bit funny when I do get up.  And usually, I get up because my bladder is bursting because I haven't tossed and turned and gotten up to empty it before the bursting point.  Then I have to hobble to the toilet and hobbling makes me feel old and decrepit.  The new bed is also, we have discovered, not very conducive to cuddling.  Our fancy Swedish memory foam pillows are quite heavy, so I can't tuck my arm under them when I am the cuddler.  I have to lay with my arm sort of mushed in between my burgeoning torso and Mr. Pear's back.  It is clearly to one's advantage to be the cuddlee in this situation.  I can't lay all the blame on the pillows (especially when they cradle my head so gently and require no nocturnal punching and rearranging).  When we had our other bed, we would take advantage of the inevitable tossing and turning and switching sides to cuddle back in.  There is no tossing and turning in this bed, so no opportunities to cuddle back in.  Therefore, I wake up feeling...well, feeling not very cuddled.

And, even worse than the cuddling (is it?  the lack of cuddling is pretty bad), I think it may be too soft.  A familiar backache has reintroduced itself.  It is the same backache I get after sleeping for more than a couple of nights on the expensive cushy mattress at my parent's house, and the expensive cushy mattress at my father in law's house, and yikes!  the expensive cushy mattress I slept on when I lived with The Fridge many, many years ago and basically all the beds I ever slept on until I met Mr. Pear and his very firm futon. 

Or it could be the unfamiliar backache of a lady with a big expanding belly falling asleep on her back and crushing everything in between.  Yeah, it could be that.  Or it could be something else...

Bad time to buy a bed, I think.  I mean, it's a good time, because I really needed it and could not sleep on the crappy futon anymore, but a bad time, because what if this ultra comfortable bed is the right bed for me, but I just don't know it because my body is in a transitional phase at the moment and therefore, unable to judge my new bed.  What if????

We have 120 days to change our minds.  There was a bed just like this one at the friendly Swedish bed shop, but a little less cushy.  I think that one might be the perfect bed.  Or maybe it would be for a pregnant lady, but not so for a no longer pregnant lady.

The anguish.

ETA:  Duh!  Swiss, not Swedish!