Mia woke up in the middle of the night on Sunday and had a hard time settling back down, and kept rubbing her ear. She woke up in the morning complaining, "hurting in my ear." Off to the doctor we went, and sure enough, she has a nasty ear infection. Probably due to the runny nose due to teething. She's on antibiotics and keeps asking for "medicine for my ear" (Motrin) as well.
So this week is shaping up to be a little off too. One of these weeks, we'll get back to "normal."
I did a post a few weeks ago about Littles' preschool transition. Well, lucky us. We got to go through it again.
Littles had started in her preschool's summer program. This actually worked out really well, as there were fewer kids and the entire program was a little less formal, so it was a good way to ease her (and us!) into it.
The "school year" officially started last Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. That meant lots of new faces, new processes (for example, a teacher now comes to get her from our car, rather than us parking and walking her in), and new rules (for example, she has to get there by 9:10, and she has to wear a uniform).
So it was almost like doing the transition all over again! Last week was rough, very comparable to her first week in school. She barely napped and was super cranky in the evenings. Normal bedtime is 8:00 PM; last week, she was out before 7:00 PM almost every night.
I also had my first parent-teacher conference :) On the first day of school, we got a note asking us to send pull-ups with Littles. As I mentioned in a previous post, we had been sending cloth diapers that function as pull-ups. Her teachers said they were too hard for Littles to pull on/off and just too much hassle for them, now that the school year had started and there were more kids. Hubby and I were pretty furious, since we had been using them for over three months at that point, with no mention of any potential issues with them.
I asked for a meeting with her teachers and we all sat down after school one day to talk about it. Long story short, once I told them that Littles had been doing pretty well with using the potty at home, the encouraged me to ditch the cloth diapers and the pull-ups, and start sending her to school in underwear.
Poor Littles! She was just getting used to everything around the new school year and we had to throw another big transition at her! On top of it all, she is cutting her last 2-year molar and it is a tough one! So this week was also pretty rough, due to all that.
But she did great. I am so proud of her. She had some #1 accidents on Monday and Tuesday, but the rest of the week, the only #1 accidents she had were when she didn't pull her pants down quite far enough when going on the potty. #2 is another story entirely, as she refuses to go on the potty at all. But we're working on it at home whenever we can, and it's great to have the support of her preschool teachers because most of her #2's are actually at preschool.
Hopefully this week, we'll be able to settle in a little bit and not have so many big changes going on!
I'm doing this post partially because this question comes up a lot on the mommy boards I frequent, and partially so that I don't lose this information myself :)
When we first selected Littles' preschool, I posed the following question in a number of different parenting forums:
My daughter will be starting preschool in June, just before her second birthday. Her preschool has no facility for refrigerating or reheating lunches. Anyone else in the same boat? Any suggestions for things that will keep well in a cooler bag with an ice pack, and then will taste good without being reheated?
I got lots of great responses, which I've compiled in a list below.
Be sure to cross-check this list against any rules at your preschool. For example, Littles' preschool does not allow nut products, and they ask that we don't send yogurt tubes, just regular yogurt in a cup. Also, if your preschool provides any snacks, you might want to figure out what types of snacks they usually serve. At Littles' preschool, it's almost all refined carbs (Goldfish, Cheerios, animal crackers, etc.). So we try to minimize those kinds of carbs in her lunch, because she gets plenty at snacktime.
One big tip that I got was to heat food at home and send it in a Thermos. We purchased two Foogo food jars, which can safely keep food hot for up to 5 hours. We pack her lunch at around 8 AM for her to eat at 11 AM, so we're easily within that 5-hour window. (Tip: I found the cheapest prices on these food jars at Wal-mart. They only sell them online, but you can get free shipping using their Site to Store option.)
The full list of suggestions:
Unfortunately, right around the time that Littles entered preschool, she also entered a bit of a picky-eater phase. We're now used to veggies coming home untouched, no matter how we prepare them, and she's hit and miss on main courses too. Oh well! We'll keep trying stuff.
I've been meaning to do a post for a while on Littles' preschool transition -- but, well, life has been busy. Due in large part to the news from my previous post :)
The transition went fairly smoothly. The first week, the main issue was napping, or lack thereof. She didn't nap at all on Monday or Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, she was so exhausted and sluggish that I thought she might be getting sick! As you might imagine, she was also super crabby at night, so for that week, we mostly brought her home, got dinner on the table immediately, and put her straight to bed.
She did nap on Wednesday and then again on Friday, and she's been doing well with napping since then. Every now and then, she has a day where she naps poorly or completely skips her nap, and then she's crabby in the evening again, but it's fine as long as it's not every night!
The second week, I was in Seattle, so I don't know how she did, but I didn't hear any major complaints from Hubby.
The third week was rough because she started clinging to me and crying at drop-offs. Luckily, this only lasted for that week, and then she was back to being happy at drop-offs. In fact, she gets really excited and says, "My school!" when we pull into the parking lot.
(Now, we have the opposite problem, which is that she throws a tantrum when we come to pick her up. Literally, screaming "No! No! No!" the minute she sees us, stamping her feet, crying, even hitting. Makes me feel like Mom of the Year, let me tell you :( This little "phase" has been going on for a couple of weeks now, and I wish it would end already.)
Another minor transition issue (warning: this may be a little TMI!) was that she refused to poop at preschool for the first month or so. She used to poop regularly after her nap, but I think the napping issues that she had threw her "schedule" off. She wasn't actually constipated -- she just pooped at random times at home, rather than daily after her nap at sschool. Then, suddenly, one day in early July, she pooped three times in one day while at preschool, and she has had no issues in that department since then :)
All in all, the transition was smoother than I thought. I actually expected the napping issues and the crying at drop-off to last longer than they did!
Overall, I'm glad that we made the move when we did. Littles really seems to enjoy all her new friends and the activities that they do. Hubby and I have a few little quibbles with the school (such as sending her home one day with a huge fruit-punch face, after we had specifically requested "no juice"), but as I've written here before, no child care situation is perfect. Littles is clearly safe, happy, and surrounded by people who care for her -- those are the important things!
That's right -- for those of you who didn't already know, I'm pregnant again! The little one who we're calling "Noob" is due in February 2010, which puts me 16 weeks along right now.
Working has been much easier during this pregnancy, compared to when I was pregnant with Littles. With Littles, I was still doing a lot of onsite customer work, traveling almost weekly throughout the first trimester. I also struggled with a lot of pregnancy-related nausea and fatigue. Let me tell you, it is no fun to be onsite with a customer while you're praying that your breakfast stays down and your eyelids stay open.
This time around, the nausea and fatigue weren't as bad. Plus, I'm working from home, so even when I did feel lousy, it was much easier to manage.
The one part that sucked is that my nausea/fatigue tended to kick in right around 5-6 PM. So Littles would come home from preschool and I'd barely have the energy to get off the couch and play with her. But I really had only maybe 2 weeks where I just couldn't overcome the fatigue, a far cry from 8 weeks of feeling like absolute crap when I was pregnant with Littles.
So anyway, that's the big news! Hubby and I are already talking through issues like maternity/paternity leave, child care, and nursing/pumping... more posts to come on all of these topics, I'm sure! :)
Bad idea: Having Hubby and Littles drop me off at the airport for my flight to Seattle tonight. As we drove up, Littles asked hopefully, "Go airplane?" and it broke my heart to tell her, "No, Mommy can't take you this time." :(
Really bad idea: Picking up a copy of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper at the airport. One of the central characters is diagnosed with leukemia at age 2 -- exactly the age that Littles is right now. As I read the passages describing her mother's emotions upon hearing the diagnosis, I imagined going through that with Littles. I seriously had to stop reading, because I was crying so hard that I was afraid my seatmate would wonder what the heck was going on.
Now all I want to do is go hug my beautiful, healthy little girl... but instead, I'm stuck in this stupid hotel room alone :(
I was in the office today and had lunch with one of my friends, who had her first baby back in January. She just started back at work a few weeks ago, so not surprisingly, it didn't take long for our conversation to drift to the topic of working motherhood.
She is pretty unhappy right now, for a variety of reasons, and talking fairly seriously about quitting her job to stay home with her daughter. Listening to her struggles took me back to my early months back at work.
I started this blog about three months after I returned to work, which means you all were spared the depths of my working-mom despair. I've talked a little bit about it, here and here, but... well, it was bad. Sometimes, I look back and I'm just amazed I made it through and that I am so genuinely happy right now. That's what I tried to get across to my friend.
Specifically, I told her about my worst day as a working mom.
It was in December, the week before Christmas, so Littles was 6 months old and I had been back to work for just under two months. I was working in the same job that I had had before going on maternity leave, which was an onsite product support position. Pre-baby, that job often took me on the road for overnight travel.
Luckily, while I was on maternity leave, an amazing opportunity opened up. A customer located just 20 minutes away from my home purchased a block of "dedicated" hours -- basically, they paid big bucks to get a support person assigned to work through support issues with them. I hoped to be that person, as it would guarantee little to no overnight travel for me.
That week before Christmas, there was a big meeting at the customer site to discuss plans for a big project that would require a significant amount of support. I was invited to sit in on the meeting. All the project bigwigs would be at the meeting, and I saw this as an opportunity to make a good impression and solidify me as their dedicated support person.
The meeting was scheduled from 8 AM to 5 PM. Since Hubby was out of town, this meant I had to ask Maria, our nanny, to come at 7:30 AM so that I could leave Littles with her and get to the meeting. Since it usually took a few minutes to get Littles settled with Maria, I told the meeting organizer that I'd likely be a few minutes late. Not much I could do about that -- I felt bad enough making Maria come an hour early as it was. But I also felt bad wandering in a few minutes late, knowing that the reason for my late arrival likely hadn't been communicated to all the attendees.
As usual during onsite customer visits, pumping was a huge pain. The meeting ran all day, with just some very brief breaks and a working lunch. I didn't even have enough time to make it out to my car, so I pumped in the bathroom for the first time. The female bigwigs from the meeting used the same bathroom, and I worried about what they thought when they heard the "whoomp-whoomp" of my pump. In my head, they were saying, "Why is she pumping in the bathroom? She's so stupid." "She breastfeeds? Yuck. That's so gross." (No one actually said anything to me, but I worried nonetheless.)
I also stressed about not being able to pump often enough. I had had a bout with the stomach flu about two weeks earlier, which had killed my supply, and my freezer stash was dwindling dangerously low. I was pretty sure I was just days away from supplementing with formula. It was a very bad time for me to have a day where I could barely pump at all.
So it was a stressful day for all those reasons. But the kicker came at the end of the day.
As I said before, the meeting was scheduled to run till 5 PM. 5 PM rolled around and the leader showed no signs of wrapping things up. Then, at 5:30 PM (the time that Maria expected me home), we launched into an entirely new -- and extremely important -- topic of conversation. This was not something that could be covered quickly. I knew it could take hours.
I sat in the back of the room squirming. With Hubby out of town and no family or friends anywhere nearby, I was the only one who could pick up Littles.
There were no openings in the conversation for me to explain why I had to leave. And I was on the verge of tears anyway, and didn't trust my own voice.
Finally, at 6 PM, I got up and just walked out. (I later found out that the meeting ran until almost 9 PM.)
I ran to my car and sobbed the entire way home. I felt like a complete failure, as an employee and as a mother. I just wanted to make it all stop, quit my job and stay at home and stop feeling pulled in so many different directions. It is very lucky that I was at a customer site and not at my own office, because if my boss had been there at that moment, I might have quit my job on the spot.
That was absolute rock bottom for me. I teared up today as I was talking to my friend about it, just remembering all the emotions I was feeling at the time.
It turned out that I hadn't made a terrible impression on the bigwigs -- or if I had, no one said anything or acted badly towards me. I was able to act as their dedicated support person for the next few months, until I moved into my current job, and it kept my travel low and my life somewhat sane.
On the mom front, Maria didn't mind my late pickup at all. And I made it through the last few days before Christmas (and then my remaining months pumping at work) without having to supplement with formula, so there were no long-term ill effects from that day of not pumping enough.
And now... here I am. Happy with my working mom life. If you had told me on that December drive home that I would be here today, I never would have believed it.
I'm so glad I stuck it out.
