I had a free day today! Clair was back in daycare. I had a plan. I would drop her off, then hit the gym and get some errands done.
So much for plans. Matthias dropped us off on his way to work, and I walked the mile or so back home. Since I hadn’t eaten any breakfast by that point, I decided to have some food and catch up on news before getting going. Then, I got sleepy……. I laid myself down for just a minute, and two hours later, I woke up…… And, by that point, a falafel sounded a lot better than the gym. What can I say?
I think I haven’t fully recognized how tired we have been lately. I say ‘we’ because Clair also did a two hour nap in daycare today (her longest nap there ever).
She has been a bit insane lately. I think it is related to the new found mobility. She is very close to walking and has become a champ at getting around on all fours. Having this freedom jacks her up on energy, apparently. She was so wound up for a few nights that she didn’t get to sleep until close to 10:00! Then, of course, she woke up once or twice in the night to nurse. I have actually been sleeping with ear plugs so she doesn’t wake me just making random noises when she stirs. I am a very light sleeper when it comes to Clair. I can still hear her if she cries though - she is loud.
I have finally taken a page out of my mom’s parenting book in order to get her to sleep. My mom says that I was so energetic as a kid that she, literally, had to pin me down in bed to help me clam down so I could sleep. This is what Clair has been like for a week or so. Yesterday, I just put my legs over hers as we lay in bed. She kept wiggling her toes, but she calmed down considerably. Within a minute or two, she was passing out! Brilliant mom! It worked again tonight. Thanks for the tip mom. Hopefully we don’t get into the epic wrestling matches you had getting me to bed!
Speaking of being sleepy, I am going to bed early again tonight (with ear plugs ’cause that’s the great mom that I am).
Here is a peak at her close-to-walking skills. Warning - turn down your volume. She is also demonstrating her banshee screaming skills.
Note to self - The wine rack needs to be higher….. or I need to tie those bottles down. Another, peripheral lesson, is to remember when you pick your baby out of a puddle of wine and glass shards that the baby’s feet are, in fact, covered in wine.
I have an itchy head and some sore spots where the latest Laser burns are healing, and I am getting impatient with feeling sore in my body. Then I remember that I felt like my body was never going to heal from the shattered wrist found myself with just over 8 years ago.
This is me after just having earned my shattered wrist (note the legs on the ground just in front of the kneeling EMT).
Then, less than a year later (about 11 months), I was doing this:
That recovery time seemed to have lasted forever, but in the end, a year doesn’t seem like that much time to go from shattered bones to supporting my body weight. Must remember that when I feel impatient with this body. The body’s ability to heal is amazing.
Clair’s new thing is to catch a ride on our pant legs and follow us around a bit. She only does it for the first few seconds of the video and then tries to figure out where I walk off to, but you can see her in action a little bit. She has also decided that climbing on me while I try to do Yoga postures is a lot of fun! For some reason, she just sits back and watches Matthias but she likes to jump on me. I am trying to teach her that jumping on him is a lot better, but she isn’t buying it. “All mommy, all the time” seems to be her theme at the moment. I think is has something to do with her teeth and all of the mucus she is producing. I love her, but I am looking forward to my day off tomorrow while she is in daycare!
Thanks to my friend Steve, I bought the National Geographic special Stress: Portrait of a Killer from iTunes tonight. It is an awesome look at the long and short term health effects of living with stress. It is based on the work of Robert Sapolsky who also wrote Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers. This is one of the required reading texts for the Yoga Therapists training from my teacher (which Steve is part of).
Long story short, stress is bad - duh. It shows some interesting details about why it’s bad and how it affects your mind and body. Dr. Sapolsky studies baboons, and so a lot of the documentary focuses on some of the results he has learned from his work with them in the past 30 years. Matthias and I are still laughing at how we are basically just baboons who drink coffee. Some of the other researchers in the film have worked with humans, and so the results are a bit more subtle but just as interesting. I think we all know that living with stress is not good for but, I like to be reminded about how important it is to take care to manage stress everyday. This film did a good job of that without trying to tell you how to live your life.
Seeing that does give me some confidence in the idea of shifting from a science-based career path to more of sharing Yoga with people. I know it has helped me, personally, manage stress better though I am always trying to do better with that. I have inherited my dad’s nervous mind, so it will always be an up hill battle for me, I suspect. It would be cool to know that something I can share with someone else could help them deal more effectively with stress too.
I have to say that the video of the baboon families also made me laugh at myself because the little baby baboons clingy to their mommies looked a lot like Clair holding on to me in her carrier! I have been calling her my little monkey lately, but maybe she is a bit more like a baboon than I realized! If she looks like a baby baboon, then what does that make me?
As I was walking home from the grocery store on Monday, I noticed I was feeling a bit fatigued. I had to catch my breath a couple of times. Granted, I was carrying a half ton of groceries and pushing Clair’s stroller, which had the other half ton of groceries, but still, I felt weaker than normal. I didn’t think much of it.
I woke up Tuesday morning feeling very much like I did when I was first pregnant, nauseous beyond belief. After freeing myself of the contents of my stomach, I felt a bit better but still weak and generally awful. My fears of being pregnant subsided as the joint aching and fever kicked in shortly after. A friend told me her husband had the same thing recently and it lasted only 24 hours. The count down began.
Luckily, Clair is a mellow kid. I laid her down around 12:30 for a nap, and then I laid down, on my right side, and stayed there until four or five hours later. She woke up after an hour or so, and basically just played by herself. Matthias came home early at some point in there because I had called to inform him that can no longer do anything more than lie on my right side and close my eyes. I pretty much stayed in bed all night sweating.
I did feel better by Wednesday morning but no where near feeling fit - no simple 24 hours for me. I would get winded if I walked across the apartment. Clair got a couple of more hours of alone time in the afternoon again as I took a two hour nap (am I the world’s greatest mom or what?). I woke up this morning again feeling generally crappy. I just took Clair to daycare and was hoping to have energy to accomplish a few things in town and around the house!
At this point, some of my lack of energy may be coming from lack of food. I didn’t eat at all after my little morning cleanse on Tuesday, and I at a few rice cakes and a frozen pizza yesterday. I still have no appetite now, but I should eat something before I fall over.
I was flipping through some photos and rediscovered this sequence I took in the Munich airport on our way to the U.S. in March. Matthias and I were just having a coffee before heading through security. I was just taking random snaps of the two of them. I love the shots all together as a group!
So, I thought Sarah Palin should be left alone because her odd press conference kind of hinted that her and her family needed that. Then, she called all the major networks to come down to the lake where her family seemed to be retreating and continued to expand on the gobbly-gook that she gives as an explanation of her actions. I couldn’t really defend her right to privacy after that - she just seemed to be asking for it.
Surprisingly, I found an article by Peggy Noonan about the whole Palin phenomenon that I actually completely agree with. That was a bit surprising considering that Noonan comes off as a bit of a raving maniac quite often, but that is usually when she is on TV speaking. Perhaps she writes more coherently than she speaks, but it is nice to read words from a rather right-wing spokes person that is thoughtful, intelligent, reflective, and dare I say, “elitist”?
I can’t stand most of the wild speculation about her decision to quit. There is no news on this topic, but none the less, it is dominating most of the news papers.
It may have been a really poorly presented decision (her press conference and her ‘justifications’ were a bit odd and disjointed), but there are more important things to focus on. It doesn’t matter why this woman did what she did, she is leaving the state in good hands (possibly better hands?). She seems to be happily killing some animals now, so let her be. I don’t like the woman’s politics (to say the least), but she obviously needs some time away from the insanity of US politics and the 24 hours news cycle. She’ll have to deal with the consequences of those actions if she stays in politics.
