(cough, cough) Rant (cough)

Gentle readers, I present to you my Top 5 least favorite things about spring cold season:

5. The cold will inevitably start with the youngest member of your family. Caring for said youngster will wear you down until you to submit to the fury that is the spring cold.

4. The kid will fare better and recover far sooner than you will.

3. Coughing keeps everyone awake. Coughing will cause your child to wake up in the middle of the night. It is almost impossible to fall asleep next to someone who is coughing. It is also completely impossible to fall asleep while coughing, as Jon and I both discovered at 11 p.m. last night.

2. At some point, someone will leave a tissue in their pocket, and the tissue will go through the washer and dryer causing you to spend an extra 15 minutes picking tiny bits of 2-ply out a load of clean laundry.

1. Snot. Tonight, instead of a good-night kiss, my darling, dearest girl gave me a hug and then grabbed a fistful of my t-shirt and wiped her nose on it.

Ah, spring cold season, I would curse you unto heaven, if it wouldn't result in a massive coughing fit...

I Love Her, but...

In which I rant, whine, and generally complain and no one feels sorry for me.

I love my daughter. I love her to pieces. Can't imagine my life without her, but as every parent knows, there are some things about parenthood I could do without (unless you're one of those crazy, over-involved parents who actually likes changing diapers, wiping snot, and cleaning cheerios out of every crevice in your house, in which case, I have one word for you: Nut Job). Herein, in the rant for which none of you will feel sympathy, I list some of the things I will not miss about early toddlerhood:

1. I will be sooooo glad when the first finger on my right hand no longer smells permanently of Desitin. Seriously...

2. I will be forever grateful when my bathroom no longer looks like this on a regular basis:

3. I'll be super-excited when I can walk into my kid's bedroom and not be met by a wall of diaper-smell. It doesn't seem to matter how often we clean/empty the trashcan. The smell abides.

4. I will not miss the daily force-brushing of teeth that only results in tears, screaming, and biting:

5. I will gladly bid a not-so-fond farewell to the nightly pajama wrangling that usually ends in more screaming, along with some thrashing, kicking, and overall unhappiness.

As I said above, I know no one is going to feel sorry for me, but sometimes, you just need to unload.

Grrrrrrrr...Part I

Lately, I have become increasingly irritated with baby clothes, specifically the size and shape of "girl" clothing. As none of you will know because we're slackers and never got it up on the blog, Maddie recently had her nine-month "Well Baby" check-up, and let's just say, she's a little larger than the average nine-month-old. Okay, so she's 24 lbs., which puts her in the 98th percentile for weight, and she's 28.75" long, which puts her in the 81st percentile for height, and her head is still a gigantic melon of a cranium, measuring in the 88th percentile. (For those of you not familiar with the whole percentage thing, this means she weighs more than 98% of the kids her age, she's taller than 81% of the kids her age, and she'll soon pull small planets into her gravitational field.)

Having a big, healthy baby is not a bad thing. This weekend, at the Farmer's Market in Lawrence, a woman came up to Maddie tickled her legs, and called her thighs delicious. I would happily hand over the keys to my car if someone called my thighs "delicious." (Unless that person happened to be a certain Dr. Lecter, and then I would run, quickly, in the opposite direction.) However, dressing said above-average child is a completely different matter, one that is becoming increasingly frustrating.

See, for some reason that totally baffles me, even in the 12-18 month clothing range (That's what you have to wear when you're 89% larger than your peers; I averaged it, and no, it doesn't really work that way.), clothing for girls is different than clothing for boys. It's not such an issue with the shirts. Luckily for Maddie and her little pot-bellied-stove of a tummy, the empire waisted looks is back, and shirts for girls tend to be a little roomier anyway. (This is also a good thing for her mother, who inexplicably decided to eat an insane amount of doughnuts and Taco John's on Sunday. Bad idea...) The pants, though--the waists are all lower, the waistbands tinier, and the thighs tighter than on boys pants for the same age range. How do I know this? Because I've been trying to squeeze her into 12-18 month "girl" pants for months with little success, and I bought a pair of boys jeans at a garage sale, and they fit like a dream, that's how. They may not look as cute, and they may have a faded, almost acid washed, kind of 90s look to them, but they don't make it impossible for her to continue sitting up because her joint movement is restricted!

I'm sorry, but am I the only person who finds this ridiculous? I've seen a lot of babies, especially recently, and I have to say that aside from the fact that every baby is different in their own way, I don't see that much difference, physically, between girl babies and boy babies. (And yes, I know there are a couple rather noticeable differences, but all the babies I've seen have been clothed, and they all wear diapers, so let's not go there.) Babies are babies, and I don't see why we have to gender their clothing at such a young age, especially when it comes to fit. Put your daughter in all the sparkly, pink, feathered (read stupid, ridiculous, and pointless) stuff you want, or dress your son in head-to-toe trucks and rockets (again, silly), but there shouldn't be any difference in the way the clothing fits.

I guess what really bothers me is the signal this sends at such a young age. I know she's not really old enough to be aware of what she's wearing, but I feel like society is already telling her that her thighs and butt are too big, that cute babies don't have a stomach that hangs over their waistband, that she is not, in fact, delicious because she doesn't fit into "girl" clothes. As a woman who's had her own share of body-image issues, this makes me angry. What am I supposed to do? Dress her in onsies all the time? Tell her she's a "plus-size" baby, so she doesn't deserve clothes that fit well and look cute? (By the way, I think that's crap with adult people, too.)

I know I'm projecting a lot right now (and just for disclosure's sake, I should probably note that her clothes might fit a bit better if we didn't use G-diapers, but why should clothing only be made for babies that use disposables?), but I'm really, really bothered by the idea that people think girls are so much different from boys, even at such a young age. No wonder we can't get through the glass ceiling. We can't even sit up because our pants are too tight!

Parenting--Complete with a Free Helping of Guilt

First of all, I know I already broke my little promise to myself. It's been well over a week since my last post. (Yeah, I knew there were some of you who were thinking, "No way is that going to happen. We know what a slacker Alaina is.") Secondly, I said this was going to be my "mommy-free" zone, but who am I kidding? I don't really have that much else going on. I just wanted to pretend that I did for a little while.

Now, onto the topic at hand: Guilt. I was talking to Jon the other day, and I said that having Maddie had given me a new appreciation for three emotions I only thought I'd experienced before. I love her more than I ever thought I could love anything, really. As cliche and trite and twee as that sounds, I do. If cutting my own foot off would make her happy, I'd probably do it. Okay, no I wouldn't because I'm sure there's a moral lesson to be learned about not doing things that hurt other people for your own selfish pleasure, and as her mom, it's important that I teach her this, but you get the idea.

Along with the love, there's the fear. If you have kids, I know you know what I'm talking about. You lie awake at night thinking about all the things that could possibly happen to your child--even the things that could only happen to your child if you were involved in a fiery plane crash and somehow, no one survived except your baby, and how long would she survive on a desert island before... No? Maybe it's just me. Anyway, the fear is normal. Perhaps the imagination is a little overactive, in my case, but the fear is normal.

Finally, there's the guilt, but here, it seems I am alone. Jon said he feels the love and he feels the fear, but he doesn't feel the guilt. "What?" I said. "You don't sit around wondering which of your recent actions will be the one that sends her to therapy?" So, I mulled this over for a few days, and I thought, maybe it's just Jon. Maybe his ego is so massive that it doesn't occur to him he could be irrevocably screwing up Maddie's psyche for the rest of her life! So, yesterday, when I went to get my hair cut, I asked my stylist. He said that it's totally a woman thing. He has two little boys, and he doesn't feel guilt. He laid it out pretty well, though. "Think about it," he said. "When I go back to work three days after my son is born, no one thinks twice about it. If you did that, you'd be a horrible mother. Even when you do go back, there will always be people who tell you you're making the wrong decision, and your child will suffer as a consequence. But, if you don't go back to work, you're not a Woman with a capital "W." You're supposed to be able to do it all, and you can't, and so you never feel like you give 100% to anything, and therefore you feel guilty, all the time." (Okay, so I'm totally paraphrasing. He's not quite that eloquent, and my memory's not that good, but that was the basic idea.

So, here's where the blog gets interactive: If you're a parent, what do you feel about the guilt? I want to hear from moms and dads. If you're not a parent, what are your feelings on the obvious double-standard we have going on here? Give me your feedback; seriously, I'm interested.

(I have placed a poll off to the right for a quick assessment of your parenting guilt.)

A Crime Against Nature

As you may or may not know, the Webster-Stoppel clan recently bought their first home, and for the most part, we're still madly in love with it. However, as with most new things, there are certain points you wish you'd noticed before purchasing said item--the bath towels that you swore were blue in the store, only to find out that in your bathroom, they're totally gray, or the gap that appears in that super-cute new button-down that gives your co-workers more insight into your "world" than you'd anticipated. I'm having similar feelings about the closet in the master bedroom.

When we first looked at the house, the closet in the master bedroom was a selling point. It's huge; actually, it's two closets, with two doors and two lights and everything. I was so excited that Jon and I weren't going to have to struggle to smash everything into one closet, and more importantly, my dresser wasn't going to be downstairs on a completely different level than my bedroom/bathroom. All good things, right? Fast-forward to December: Said gargantuan closet is located over the garage, and the garage is not heated (nor is it cooled, so expect similar complaints in July), and therefore, the enormous and wonderful closet is transformed into an icebox of meat locker proportions. Seriously, I think I could move some of the stuff from the deep freeze into the closet, and it would keep just fine.

So, I say unto you (and you can imagine me shaking my fists at the sky and shouting the following), it is a crime against nature to be colder when you have put your clothes on than you were before dressing! I yearn for Spring when I will no longer live in dread of choosing something to wear...