Letter to a Boy Volume 1

Last weeks blog has left me feeling so.....exhausted. I was surprised at the mob mentality of women. Why, when something works so positively for one woman, would you slam it, and try to tell that woman why she is wrong? It reminds me why I mostly keep to myself. There's never a shortage of people who want to tear you apart because you're different.


 I wanted to write something positive this week. So I wrote a letter to my boy. This is what it says.

Dear Son,

When I was pregnant with you, I would dream of you in the night. I imagined your dark hair, against your pale skin, and your little dark eyes.
During the day I would feel you move against my belly. I would swish-sway you to sleep on summertime walks.
Being pregnant with you made me crave white vinegar. The smell would make my mouth water, and when Amanda's head was turned, I would sip it right out of the bottle. It would take my breath away.

I knew before you came, I would never hurt you. I would never let any harm come to you. I found a ferociousness in the center of my being, which pulsed with a heartbeat saying "Take care of your boy, take care of your boy".
I became a lioness.

Then you came to me. Day turned to night and back again. You and your dubby slept beside my bed. I sighed with a contentedness now that you were here.

For the first time since I lost my own mother, I felt the feeling again of being connected to someone, without words, without a look, simply by breathing in each other's air, by feeling each other's skin.
I understood the things you needed, sometimes before you needed them. I knew the answer to questions you had, by being one in the long line of many mothers for thousands of years. Without knowing it, you healed some wounds I have had for my entire life.

When you fall asleep at night, against my side, I watch your face soften and relax. I kiss your lips, the lips I made, and watch you. I fall asleep beside you, and your dubby. Words escape me at your perfectness.

I no longer dream of you, because you changed from those dreams, and now you are here with me.

This is the first letter of many,

All of my love to you, my first child

Your mama

The Submissive Wife

Candace Cameron Bure. You are in trouble with women everywhere. Women are gnashing their teeth and sucking in their breath. Putting their hands to their hips and waggling their necks back and forth. You mentioned two words that women these days hate to hear together, or at least pretend they do. Wife and Submissive.

Recently in the news, Candace Cameron Bure (you all remember her as D.J. from Full House) got into some hot water for saying "I am not a passive person, but I chose to fall into a more submissive role in our relationship because I wanted to do everything in my power to make my marriage and family work,"

Well. When people read that, they went apeshit crazy. Omigod. A woman who chooses to play a womanly and submissive role! She should be shot! 

Well, here's the thing ladies. I totally agree with her. And this is why.

In every situation in life, at least in natural life, there has to be a balance of things. If you own a dog, you have to lead it, be it's master. If you have a child, you have to be the disciplinarian. If you have a garden, you have to weed it, and decide where the plants will grow. See what I'm sayin? You can't have two chiefs, or two indians. If you do, shit just doesn't get done. Yin and frickin Yang homey.

I know in todays society, women are aghast at taking second place to their husbands. Women have worked so hard to become equal. And that's fine. But even in that situation, one of the pair has to take the drivers seat. Which reminds me. There are not two drivers seats in a car....
Anyway. I'm not saying it always has to be the woman. If you decide to be the breadwinner, and your husband decides to stay home and raise kids and clean house, then I guess you're the boss.
I'm not saying you have to be all "Yess Massa" to your husbands. You still will have a voice. 

BUT SOMEONE HAS TO LEAD!

And this is why I think marriages have little to no success rate these days. There are no checks and balances. There is no accountability. There are just two people saying "I thought that was your job" and gluing their faces to their smartphones. 

I like to think of myself as the assistant to Amanda. I try to think of what she needs before she needs it. I do my job to the best of my ability. I put 110% effort into our romantic relationship. I never say no to sex.
And I don't care if you think I'm crazy. Because I know I'm not. I know this is what it takes to make a longstanding relationship work. You can't just glide through, and hope to come out on the other end together. I've tried that before. It might get you six years. Might.

So the rest of you can be just fine on your side with your "we're equal" bullshit. You can go through sixty seven relationships pondering, why the hell didn't that work?

I will stay on my side, with my choices and beliefs about being a good wife. Because after all, that is the most single important part of life. Family. 

I can tell you are still irritated, still don't agree. But tell me this ladies; If women don't long for real men, the way they used to be, all assertive, and ungroomed and gruff, then why did "50 Shades of Grey" Sell  70 fucking MILLION copies? 

Just think on it.

Let's Burn Jenny McCarthy At The Stake!

I'm on a furious writing bender. I seriously cannot stop. I also can't stop eating all of the Christmas chocolate and poking at my doughboy belly, but that's a whole other blog post, I guess.

I really just want to take a minute to talk about this Jenny McCarthy thing. If you're reading this, you are probably a woman interested in child rearing. Or you're my brother Chris. Either way, you prolly know about Jenny McCarthy's huge campaign against Vaccines because she was sure they gave her son Autism. She has been in the media for the past ten years (give or take) talking about how bad Vaccines are for your children. No doubt, she has some followers, and has swayed many a woman into not vaccinating their child.

When I was 2 months pregnant, I worked a bullshit job for a bullshit company who bled poor, uneducated black folks of their settlement money. No lie. Needless to say, I quit there, because It takes a certain kind of person to be cool with that.
But while I was there, we'd often have a lot of time on our hands between unsuspecting clients. So I used those hours to research vaccines and there supposed hand in fucking up our children. I watched a lot of documentaries on Autism from vaccines. And it really scared me. And for a brief, hormone infected moment, I decided I would not vaccinate our child.
Then I realized those were very biased documentaries, made by very hurt, and angry mothers, looking for some way to quench their pain.
I seriously cannot even imagine going through the agony of having a child diagnosed with Autism. I bet I would look to place the blame on anything I could.
Then we had Jace, and we decided to Vaccinate him. I still don't know if it's the right thing, but I was too scared of the alternative. I'm not sure there's a right answer in this one. Once we had him, we loved him so much, we weren't willing to gamble with things like Whooping Cough or Mumps. Because those things could definitely kill him. While Autism is still super scary, he would not die from it, and it seemed like a risk Amanda and I were willing to take.

Now, I've said that, so I can say this.

On my Facebook feed this morning, women and men were blowing it up with angry rants about how stupid Jenny McCarthy is, and how she has made a huge stupid error, and how now all of these women has chosen not to get their children vaccinated, and it TURNS OUT HER SON DIDN'T EVEN HAVE AUTISM THIS WHOLE TIME!!! He unfortunately has a neurological issue, which now that Drs. know, they are working to correct. So everyone is mob style angry with Jenny McCarthy. I was for a nanosecond too, and then I put my mommy hat on.

So two things.

If you choose, or did not choose to vaccinate your child because of what Jenny McCarthy said....Then you're a fucking idiot. When it comes to your child's health, you should ALWAYS, ALWAYS do two things. Research, and then go with YOUR OWN mommy instinct. Or what I like to refer to it as Mommy Gut. What Jenny McCarthy decided for her own son, was her choice, not yours. You should never do something because a celebrity does it. Fucktards.

Now, the most important thing I want to say is this. Stop being a mean mom. It's bullshit, and it's nothing more than adult women being bullies, and I've been bullied my whole life, and I won't stand for it.

The woman made a mistake. Do you even get how stupid she must feel? How she is her own harshest critic, and how she is prolly beating herself up. Right now she's prolly laying in a dirty tee shirt funk. She prolly smells like french onion soup under her armpits, and she's prolly busy being super depressed and sobbing into her sons hair at night, because of how bad she fucked up.
It doesn't matter to her that she fucked up as a celebrity, and she's embarrassed and everyone is talking shit about her. It matters to her that she fucked up as a mom.
And what the rest of the moms should be doing out there, instead of being assholes and bullies about it, is they should be offering up kind words, and stories of their own missteps.

When other mothers fuck up, they should be taken under other mommy wings, and pampered. All mommy's fuck up and it hurts so bad when you realize you have.
There's so much anger in this world, so much materialistic bullshit. Jenny McCarthy fucked up. She blamed a group, an action, because her son was impaired, and she was pissed off, in a way only parents can be.
We do that type of shit everyday, but there's no one there to shine a Hollywood sized spot light on it.
So, what I'm saying is, If you're a mother, and you're making fun of Jenny McCarthy right now, tone it down a notch. You aren't any better because you're a mother, and now you're a bully.
So choose to do the right thing. Don't make fun of her for fucking up. Don't post on your Facebook about how she's a fuckup.
Send her some healing vibes. Post on your Facebook about how hard that must be and how sorry you feel.
Stop being such a dick. For fucks sake. UGH.

Not Your Mama's Cloth Diaper

Cloth or no cloth?
Before we had a baby, we watched our friend Lauren with her daughter, Reese. She used cloth, interchangeable with her disposables. Typically when she went out, or overnight, the baby would be in disposables. But if they were home during the day, cloth.
So, that's what we decided we would do. We stocked up on a good hundred dollars worth of cloth diapering equipment long before I was even showing.

We used several avenues.

Craigslist.
Online.
Women who sold them like Parylite Candles or Avon.

Cloth diapers can really be found almost anywhere. If you want to try them out you are in luck because they've become super popular again. Even main stream stores sell them. Like Toys R Us and Buy Buy Baby. Target even sells them. They are so trendy, I'm sure even Walmart will eventually jump on the bandwagon, where you will be able to buy them for the price of a tootsie roll and the blood sweat and tears of an indonesian child. But hopefully you won't buy yours there. Hell, maybe they already sell them. I donno, and I don't care.

Anyway.

Amanda got the system down in less than a day. For some reason, It took me until I started to use them to understand.

You can buy the liners with inserts. These are called all in twos. Or you can buy all in ones. These are the liners with the inserts already connected.
The inserts themselves come in all sorts of different styles. Bamboo and Charcoal for maximum leak protectction, Bleached cotton. You can even use prefolds, which look like the old cloth diapers we used to wear.

All of the combinations are really dizzying.

So I want to break it down for you like this.

It's going to take you a couple weeks of using them to make any decisions.

First, it's going to take a couple weeks to decide what you personally like best. You're the one who will be spraying baby shit into the toilet, wearing a fine mist of it on your face and hands. (Handy tip. Keep your toothbrushes in a medicine cabinet from now on)You're the one who will have to pull a luke warm pee soaked insert from it's shell. So you decide.

What I have decided works for me, is the all in twos. I find that the all in ones are too bulky, and they take forever to dry. I also find that they hold more moisture and of course they cost more. Plus the inserts are really thin, and wave up like a potato chip.
We only have one, and I use it last everyday, because I hate them.

Also, I still haven't found a liner I like best. If I had to choose, it would be the prefolds. For some reason they seem to hold moisture the best.

It's important that I say here too, it's going to take you a couple weeks to decide if you really want to stick with cloth diapering. So give it at least that. They are going to leak, you are going to have to hook up a sprayer system to your toilet or to your wash tub to clean them before they go in the wash. Every once and a while you are going to have to strip them of all of the detergent. It's going to take a while for you to figure out the whole system.

And it's going to take a while for you to figure out if you are indeed saving money. You will have to sit down and see if the amount of money spent on the water, the diapers the liners and everything else will save you or cost you.


Here are some cloth diapering nuggets of wisdom I wanna pass along to you....

• Diaper rash cream supposedly makes them leak

• They smell realllllllllllllll bad if you don't wash them immediately.

(esp if you keep them in a closed lid hamper. I learned that the hard way)

• You'll prolly bank on washing them every other day

• It's kinda awesome when your disposable pile takes forever to dwindle

• You'll use your Diaper Genie wayyyy less and save on refills

• Don't use cloth in the first two weeks. The Meconium will never come out of them.

• Get a scrub brush for the poopy ones. Breast milk poo stains cloth.

• Expect people to be resistant to the idea of you cloth diapering your baby. Expect them to give you all sorts of reasons not to.

• Always have a change of clothes, because cloth leaks.

• Cloth diapers barely fit under your babies clothes. Also cloth makes your baby look like an old man with a dumpy gut.

• If you use all in twos, pre assemble them before you need them

• Oh, and change cloth diapers a little more often than disposable, which is about every two hours. It doesn't wick the moisture away all that well.

• And a freebie from my friend Lauren; Use a cloth with essential oils in the bottom of your cloth pail, and in your cloth away from home bag. Your nose will thank you.

I could tell you six million other things about cloth diapering. Really, this blog could go on for hours.
But you know, read this, take what you will from it, and as I learned from Lauren, as with everything else in child raring, you don't have to take cloth diapering so seriously.

Teeeeeeeeeettttthhhh

I feel like a baby boomer with a computer. I'm hunting and pecking with one finger and one hand. Im holding a teething baby with the other, who after three hours of shrieking in pain, has finally fallen asleep in my right arm turning 14 pounds into 50.
Has your baby started teething yet? It's a very wet process. He's turned into a Saint Bernard celebrity. Drool everywhere. Several outfit changes a day. There's ice in a washcloth pooling on our repurposed coffee table.

                                                               We tried it, he hated it.


There's several bags of teething pods, the safer and organic alternative to Oragel which has Benzocaine.

We tried that on his gums. That made him scream even louder. Have you ever had the opportunity to stare down your babies throat as he screams and tears the flesh from your face? It's like looking down the mouth of a whale....
Baby Tylenol? Might as well be a placebo.
Mam  Teether? He shirked that too.

Which is surprising because he loves his Mam pacies. It just goes to show that you never know. You never know what your baby will like and dislike. Especially when they're teething. They become so irrational.

Having wisdom teeth myself that shoulder against my gums from time to time, I understand the sheer pain and torture it is when you have teeth pushing against your skin. It's so horrific.
But it sucks so much more for a baby. They can't articulate the pain, any other way than crying. They can't mix Tylenol 3's with whiskey. They just have to tough it out like champs.

I'm hoping we get through this quickly. I'm hoping these pearly whites start popping through like tomorrow. Or better yet in the next five minutes.

And I'm trying not to think about the fact that until he's around three, we have twenty more teeth to go....

Another Baby Pic on my FB feed

This one is for all of my Facebook friends who don't have children. I want to touch on the topic of the endless stream of baby pictures that you see in your feed and why.

Before I had a baby, I HATED scrolling through my Facebook feed. It was like this.....Cool post, boring post, baby pic, baby pic, baby pic, baby pic. Everyone's babies looked exactly the same to me. I would outwardly groan. C'mon motherfuckers, how many shots can you post of your baby doing EXACTLY the SAME THING every single fucking day!!!!!! So rude. All of these parents posting baby pics totally cut into my self absorbed pre-baby routine. I really didn't give a shit that your kid smiled, or was wearing a cute outfit, or was having a birthday. I never hit the like button. I even considered hiding certain people from my feed. I hated baby pics. I would rather see 4,000 memes than another baby picture.

And then I had Jace. And I totally got it. I started genuinely looking at other parent's baby pictures. I actually enjoyed really studying them. Even looked forward to seeing a new barrage of pictures everyday.



There's three reasons why. The main one is, Until I became a parent, I simply could not comprehend the way you love a child. I am not a good enough writer to put it into words. I could never explain to someone who doesn't have children the feelings you get when you finally do.
Secondly, when you become a parent, you have a commonality with other parents. You enjoy seeing pictures of babies screaming, or puking or holding onto toys. Because you know the struggles those parents go through having that baby, and you also see yourself and your child in those pictures.
Lastly, whether you want to hear this or not, before you are a parent you are one self centered motherfucker. You have nooooo idea. You might say to yourself, I volunteer, I work with kids, I love animals, I head special needs olympics in third world countries. Doesn't matter. Swear to god, until you have a baby, you are super self centered. Just take stock of how many selfies you have posted. Enough said.
And it should be that way. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just par for the course.
So try to understand that when you see all of those damn baby pictures in your Facebook feed, it's so much more deep than another annoying baby shot.

And maybe some day your time will come and you will start posting baby pics too. If not though, try to walk in a mother's or father's shoes.
 How can you get sick of so much love?

Sexy Time after Baby Comes

After 121 days it has finally happened. Amanda & I had a chance at sex and we were both disinterested.
Here's how it went down. Sunday morning on the couch.

Amanda: The baby isn't crying, wanna do it?
Me: eeeeeeeee. Not really.................(45 second pause) But I could take care of you, no problem!
Amanda: No....That's ok. Then I'd have to get up and shower, and anyway I'm just not feeling too good.

We stare at each other as if we've never seen each other before. Her eyes are beady looking at me, and I can't really read them. The last thing I want to do is have sex. I feel gross, tired and aggravated. I suspect she feels the same.
I pat her leg and slink away to the kitchen. Instead of having my head rammed repeatedly into the headboard, I'll make 6 million lbs of sweet potato gnocchi. If that's not a sign of sexual frustration, I don't know what is.

So while I'm elbow deep in flour, I really think about this situation.
We have been trying to have sex for almost a month now. Whole weeks have gone by where we have literally tried every night, and where the baby would immediately start crying, like he had some sort of anti-sex sensor embedded in his forehead. We would give up, or immediately stop what we were doing and tend to him, often times falling asleep together on the bed, cantankerous and defeated.
I am so lonely for Amanda that I have dreamt about sex every night since our last encounter. This must be what it feels like to be a 14 year old boy.

Yet still I declined her last invitation for some lovin. Why?
Well,  because I reasoned with myself, I am 110% absolutely fucking exhausted. But it's more than that too. Sex for me is like exercise, or an ice cold pool. If I keep it goin, it keeps on goin. If I put a stop to it, or it gets stopped by a needy first child, then dipping my toe back in becomes really hard. And It's not that I don't like sex. Anyone who knows Amanda and I can sometimes understand that we are too sexual with each other. I am certain I've seen some eye rolls and dirty looks from our friends. I get it, we're over the top. But we're in love. Still.

So what it boils down to, for me or any new mother is this....You're gonna get super fucking tired. You're gonna feel like jumping off a cliff instead of having sex sometimes, but don't say no! The first couple minutes, you might be cursing yourself, it might hurt a little because you'll be thinking about the strange noise the baby made earlier today, or whether or not Dish Nation will be another re-run.  But go with it. Try to power everything else down and give yourself over completely to your man.
Sex is something you can still do for you, separate from being a mother. (Even though that's likely how you became one)
Also, I know I can be kinda out of the 1940's sometimes but, you always want to make sure to take care of your honey so they don't look outside of your dirty, baby furnished home for some love.
You fell off the horse, get your ass back on...
And Amanda, if you're reading this....come home...