A Cat Peed On This

This is a post that approximately three of you have been waiting for. Wherein, my baby does absolutely nothing cute, and I keep it real. I do not keep it short, so just be warned.

This is really for a few of my work girls, who accosted me in an isolation room informed me nicely me that my blog is bringing everyone down due to the excessive positive content. Apparently there is way too much chunky baby sentimental sweetness in my posts and people are starting to think our lives are all precious moments and butterfly kisses and bedtime stories.


I can see how I've led you astray.

I told Joshua about this workplace harrassment friendly reminder the next night, and he stared at me for a second to see how serious I was and then I think he busted a gut laughing. Literally, we looked around at the dirty dishes and unfolded laundry and mournful, underappreciated animals and whiny Matilda with carrots in her hair and we just laughed for a solid minute because people! Our lives are a hot mess.

Before we scampered off to the lake every day last weekend, we had a long string of incredibly crappy days. As I was leaving for work on last Tuesday, Joshua told me that it was going to be eighty degrees and sunny on Friday and I burst into tears. To clarify: I started crying because the weather was going to be gorgeous on my day off. That is a place you arrive at when you are wretchedly sleep deprived and overwhelmed, and I was both of those things.

During that stretch of crappy days, I had to take a cab home from work at 12:30am because Joshua left his phone on silent during my evening shift and slept right through the whole part where he was supposed to come pick me up. So I fumed all the way home while sending him passive aggressive texts with the cab number and the driver's description just in case I was murdered instead of driven to my destination (have I watched too many crime dramas? I think yes).

That was Thursday. Then I only slept roughly 13 hours from Friday morning to Monday morning. I will go ahead and do the math for you - the recommended amount of sleep an adult should be getting between a Friday and a Monday is about 24 hours. It's all fine and good to have a baby who sleeps through the night when you are a parent who sleeps through the night but what if you are the odd night-shift working, breastfeeding mother who has to sleep in the day? You. are. screwed.

And you are even more screwed if during your work weekend your typically sweet-as-pie daughter is wanting to eat more frequently than usual due to The Teething. Matilda's first tooth actually broke through her gums a day or two later, and while I feel absolutely terrible for the little munchkin's misery, can I just ask what is the deal with teething? Was there a reason those chompers could not be part of prenatal development? Like when you are busy growing your bones and organs painlessly? I realize a baby with a full grill would be a little terrifying, but we'd all get used to it. Right?

Anyways, there was a lot of woe from Matilda's end, and a lot of frustration from Joshua who was the sole caregiver except for when she briefly stopped whining to eat, and a lot of desperation from me and by Monday afternoon, with only 4 more hours of sleep added to that 13 from the weekend, I was a complete wreck. There was this hour right before Joshua got home where Matilda just groaned and rubbed her hands on her gums and I sat on the couch holding her while she tried to throw herself and all her teether items onto the floor repeatedly. I would like to say that we were both crying, but I honestly can't remember if I had enough energy for that outpouring of emotion. I may have just stared at the wall and thought about crying.

Tuesday I had to work overnight again (this is when I ruined my makeup over the weather forecast) and when my poor baby woke up from her afternoon nap on Wednesday she promptly lost her little tooth-cutting mind. So being the calm and rational working mother that I am, I went ahead and lost my mind as well.

I had been in Matilda's room organizing some laundry while she napped and trying to pick up the disaster that is our house after I've worked five out of six nights in a row (not Joshua's fault! Hi, Joshua! You are a wonderful dad!) Maybe I could have kept it together were it not for this stench that had been wafting around in her room. It's a very long story but basically her room had not smelled good for a few weeks, and since our building needs new tuckpointing we were convinced there was mold and must from water damage in the brickwork.

So here I am, literally days behind on sleep, clutching an angry, thrashing child as I run around from corner to corner in her room attempting to finally pin down where the smell was the strongest. I had to stop my desperate quest in order to pick up Joshua from a meeting, and I will say that our ride home was not my finest hour. It was a lot of ranting and whining and words that will have to be edited out of our conversations once Matilda is about ten minutes older than she is now, and at one point I hollered, "I cannot live somewhere that smells! I hate our condo! We are going to lose all our money because it's molding and we are going to have to live there forever because no one will ever buy it!" (see, I edited the swearing) at which point I began crying. Again. AGAIN.

We got home and Joshua wisely took Matilda away from me (naturally, she was all sweetness upon being reunited with the sane parent) while I resumed my wild-animal-style sniffing around her room. I managed to get to this one corner that smelled the slightest bit stronger than anywhere else and when I made Joshua check it for me, he moved her curtain the slightest bit and then said,

"Oh. Oh my god. A cat peed on this."

A CAT PEED ON THIS.

I had written multiple huffy emails to our condo association about the unacceptable 'mold' smell in my daughter's room, demanding quicker action on the brickwork and after weeks of going crazy over this 'undefinable' musty smell, as it turns out A CAT PEED ON THIS.

Do I even have to tell you that I cried again?

So yes. Our most recent weekend was filled with trips to the lake and mimosas at brunch (which a certain nameless six month old may have dumped right into my lap, thanks) and playing on the rug in the middle of a sweet-smelling baby girl's room. But if you start thinking that we are all fun, all the time, please just picture me shaking with the overtired caffeine jitters weeping into a pack'n'play while my lovely daughter refuses to nap and I have to work again. And I love my job and my life and my family but it was a little painful to realize I have been walking around in a fog for weeks, composing nasty emails about mold in our walls and sobbing about losing our life savings over it when really, oh hell it was actually the stench of cat pee that nearly pushed me over the edge.

A CAT PEED ON THIS.

Happy Nurses Week!

Yes, I have returned to work just in time for National Nurses Week! I like to think of this week as a great time to celebrate our challenging and rewarding profession, and also a great time to receive a new tote bag or some sort of hospital-logo'd swag. Or even a pen. I'm not picky.

To be entirely honest, I've never considered being a stay-at-home mom. There are so many reasons - I love my job, I love contributing financially to our family, I have much better and cheaper health insurance, we live in an expensive city and have a mortgage and a houseful of animals and a coffee habit to maintain and I just found out how much preschool costs around here...maybe I'm getting off track here, but the bottom line is that we are a dual income family by choice. This is what works for our family, at this point in our lives. Of course there is also the small matter of me being contractually obligated by the federal government to stay at my job for another 1.5 years while they pay off my student loans. I'm pretty sure defaulting on that contract requires me to pick up trash along the highway or give my condo to a diplomat or something tragic, so! Off to work by choice and the fear of Uncle Sam I go.

But even though I knew I was going back to work 12 weeks after Matilda was born, it's not like I was thrilled about it. I work nights and (please don't hate me for what I'm about to say) my baby sleeps like a rock and I had a very restful three months off. I am actually cringing looking at that sentence; somewhere out there another mom is cursing me and God is checking off the "Colic" box on our future children. But I was nervous about all the sleep switching and Matilda's schedule and then about a week before my first day back I had this meltdown that basically went "No one can take care of my baby like I can! No one knows how to calm her down like I can! What if I can't pump enough at work and my boobs explode! What if what if SIDS SIDS SIDS I don't want to go sob sob SIDS what if exploding boobs sob sob WEEP!" Joshua would probably like to write his own version of this story, but the bottom line is I had been calm and realistic for my entire maternity leave and then I took this spectacular dive into crazytown. Even though the only people I ever have to leave Matilda with are Joshua, my mother-in-law, and my best friend. What a sketchy group of 'babysitters'.

Two weeks ago I went back to work, because that's our new (and old) routine, and because I don't want to be in the default chain gang, and it was shockingly not that bad.

I did cry when I walked out the door for the first time. And then I had a moment at Starbucks about 7 minutes later when the barista asked what she could get me and I fully intended to say an iced venti Americano but instead I choked up and just made this little squeak instead. But I pulled myself together and got to work and it was fine. I love being a nurse (Happy Nurses Week to us!), I love taking care of babies, and thankfully I am not at all a weepy mess around the sick kiddos even though I am a mom now. My boobs did not explode, Joshua did not sleep through Matilda crying, I did not forget how to do my job, and then I rushed home in the morning and have never been happier to see my little family.

I won't say that being a working mom - all two weeks of it - has been entirely smooth sailing. It's difficult to get myself ready and get enough sleep before and after work when I just want to spend time with Matilda. It's annoying to leave my patients to pump, and annoying to remember everything I need to make that happen. I end up messing up our schedules trying to breastfeed Matilda right up until the very second I have to run out the door so I don't have to pump so many times at work. We also had some trouble figuring out which bottles and nipples were best for her, even though she's taken bottles without any fuss before. It's exhausting to wake up so many times to breastfeed when I'm sleeping between shifts, since she goes for long stretches overnight but needs to eat every three hours during the day. And then this past week, Tilda was entirely obnoxious and cranky for Joshua and he was tired and frustrated himself. I called him to see how things were going and I heard the baby screeching in the background right before he yelled in a high pitched voice, "I am freeaaakkkiing out!" They certainly weren't having a good time, and I couldn't do anything about it, and that sucked.

But! I hung up that phone at work, said a little prayer for Joshua's sanity, and then realized I was actually glad I wasn't home. While I don't think I'll ever happily run out the door to work, I like being there and having a break from the day to day mommy routine. I love my coworkers, they make me laugh, and twelve hours can fly by if you are having a good time with the people around you. I also like knowing that all the time I spent busting my ass in college was worth it for this, a flexible career that allows me to have lots of time with my own baby and still take care of other babies who need help getting started in life. And Joshua is an awesome dad who pulled it together, calmed our daughter down, put her to bed and felt really proud of himself that he did it alone.

There is always the mama guilt, I think biology and The Internet will not allow you to live your life without it. I feel guilty for leaving Matilda to go to work, and guilty that I like going to work. They tell me it doesn't get any better. Which is why I am hoping for a tote bag. And why I'm so thankful that tomorrow is bringing me my first real paycheck since Tilda was born (Happy Nurses Week to ME!)



The other morning I took some pictures of the tulips that are randomly growing on the ledge of the fifth floor of the parking garage at work. I have all these sappy thoughts about beauty in the midst of concrete (there is a metaphor here, and I think it's fairly obvious) but I can't even take myself seriously enough to go down that road. I love tulips. Here they are at work. And here I am at work. They are gorgeous, and being a working mom is just fine. The End.