MuscleUpMom

Here’s a little glimpse into the recesses of my mind. You’re welcome.

Pros:

I’m fucking tired.

He might not even cry that much. Maybe it will be three bad nights and then he will sleep all night in his crib for the rest of his life.

If I don’t do it now, he will be in my bed and nursing all night when he’s six feet tall.

I’m fucking uncomfortable because I can’t stretch out.

Husband and wife hate each other and yell all night. Because everyone is tired. Marital accord.

I have to at least give it a try, right?

His beautiful crib and nursery will get a little use.

He will learn *maybe to fall asleep on his own.

Husband can do some of the dirty deeds, while I spend part of the night in my white trash neighbor’s backyard tent with Bose noise-canceling headphones.

All the old ways are no longer working. My ancestors will fight no more forever. He won’t nicely eat and sleep through the night. He’s getting worse, not better, and something needs to change.

I’m angry bird mommy. No one wants to see an angry bird mommy.

He will never remember this!

Maybe he will even learn to nap from it?

He’s tired, too.

Look at our matching undereye circles! Look at my sleep deprivation-induced hair bun!!!

Cons:

This shit won’t work anyway. It didn’t work for my first-born.

Baby crying. Make mommy sad.

He is an intense crier. I’ve seen him go from smiles to hyperventilation and cry-induced vomiting in 9o seconds flat. He is the race car of infant protestation.

If I wait it out it may get better again or he may suddenly sleep all night on his own. That will most likely be the day after Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior returns from the heavens on high to usher in the millenia of peace and love.

We will all sleep worse for a while. Maybe a long while.

I don’t like the idea of it. It’s not mammalian. It’s reptilian.

Boobs are fast sleep-inducers. I don’t need to get out of bed. But see Con: It’s not working any more.

It will wake up the three year old.

Maybe this is just a developmental-leap. He just started crawling. Maybe he’s teething? Maybe it’s the rain. Maybe it’s the sun? Maybe it’s summer. Maybe I threw the salt over the wrong shoulder? Never mind, it must be the evil eye. I knew we shouldn’t have taken that trip to Sicily on our honeymoon.

So can you figure out what It is? Should we do It?

Big things are afoot here at the Sweet household, or maybe I should say aknee. Henry has taken his first tentative crawling steps even if he moves at an adorable snail’s pace and you don’t even realize what he’s doing until he’s moved across the room.

He even drives a car. A pink car that is.

I’m feeling pretty good physically and even mentally, surprisingly, considering Henry’s sleep has gone from bad to extra bad.

I’m happily busy with writing assignments. I tried out pole dancing fitness. I’m bad at pole dancing fitness.

Yes, I'm uncoordinated. The teacher said "It seems like you're using your strength to compensate here" HAHAH

I signed up for my first post-baby race but it’s not a real race, it’s a Spartan Sprint. I mean it’s real in that it’s not virtual and conducted online or anything but it’s not a straight run because I just don’t wanna race a real race until I’m as fast as I was when I got pregnant last winter. Which isn’t really fast in the grand scheme of things but in my life it is.

Check out my sweet bike trainer set up. I STILL haven't ridden outside yet as the weather hasn't cooperated.

The Spartan should be fun as I recruited (really bullied but who’s counting) my husband, my sis and her boyfriend to do it and the kids will be there to cheer and drool us on. I have no idea if I will be fit enough to do all the obstacles but I am getting stronger and have upped my weight room intensity lately.

Doing some parallel bar dips again, which makes me feel badass (let me have my deluded fun, people) simply because I never see anyone doing those besides the big muscledudes at the gym.

Everything else in life is content and uneventful. I realize I rarely write about my three year old, mostly because she’s such an easy, breezy part of my life I seldom feel the need to complain about anything she does. She’s a little ray of sunshine, running around making me laugh day in and day out, with her princess and mermaid obsession, her left-handed artist ways, her gregarious charm.

She’s the best. And my baby boy is growing up. He can say Mama to mean me (and oh yes does he mean ME and no one else when he says it) and he says Anna in honor of his second favorite person in the world.

A-A! He yells when she comes in the room after a four minute absence which  must feel like long lonely years in seven month old time. His linguistic prowess has me wondering what else he’s saying that I don’t understand. Perhaps his babbling is all sophisticated communication I don’t get yet. Maybe he’s orating powerful baby speeches and I’m like an idiot in his face, BABABA? YAY! DADDA!

Has anyone done a Spartan? What training should I cram into the next month to get ready for the obstacles?

I’m on this Myers-Brigg tip lately. And yesterday was Mother’s Day (whoops, better call ya mama) so I got to thinking.

I stumbled across this international study of INTP women once that shows we have the highest dissatisfaction rates with traditional gender roles (including mothering etc.) because for an INTP freedom, the ability to work alone, quality independent time, and intellectual engagement are cornerstones of our happiness.

Just what a day in the life with babies and young kids is all about amiright?

INTPs are already a rare personality type  (maybe  2% of the population in comparison to types like ESFJ that are 12%) and female INTPs are supposedly even more rare.

I’m a special special unicorn snowflake.

I had a lovely Mother’ Day. I felt grateful for my children, my husband, their adorable presents and card they made together, our nice brunch (even if we had to trade off walking Henry outside and unceremoniously shoveled the delicious food down our gullets). I snuck out to try out a fitness class for an article. My husband is the best and is always, always happy to let me get out on weekends.

But yet I feel lingering sadness, because as great as he is. Sometimes I feel like I need more. Tonight for instance is my writing group. And I just can’t go. I love going to this monthly meeting. I workshop things I’m writing, I try out new, more experimental and creative types of writing. I think, I read, I talk, I get connection with other writers. I really live to go to this and since my husband is away until late tonight, I have to miss a month.

It’s not really a huge deal in the scheme of my life, but it makes me wish there was an easier way, a better way. If only I had tons of family who could and would watch my kids whenever I needed (nothing extravagant, maybe once a week when I have something professional to do) or if only my husband didn’t have to work an hour train ride away and travel.

Who said my husband was allowed to leave and travel for work and like, support our entire life financially, right? I don’t want to be a spoiled brat, it’s just that…

I’m an INTP.

I need mental freedom. Mental freedom and the daily work of raising very young children don’t mix well. My baby screams if I leave the room for thirty seconds. He sleeps with me all night. I can’t write. I have no time alone. It was cute when he said MAMA and now it’s not so cute because.

MAMAMAMAMMAMAMAMAMA  HYSTERICS VOMIT MAMA

At brunch yesterday, two kind older ladies were watching us do the impatient baby dance/eat/trade-off/juggle/make a mess in a nice place routine and one wished me a happy Mother’s Day.

“You’re really in the thick of it now,” she said. “That’s when you’re really doing it.”

And I know that. I know it’s not forever. But why do I kind of internally rage against the all-consuming nature of it? It’s not the WORK of it all. I don’t mind that. It’s something about the trappedness, the narrowing of my scope down. I have ideas. And things. To do and be and say and write. But I just don’t have the time.

And I think that’s what that INTP women survey was saying. That fundamentally parts of our personality are incompatible with the roles of mother, or at least the way they are prescribed in our culture. You should be endlessly satisfied with taking care of small children all day because they are miraculous adorable creatures (they are, and I am. But.)

Were any of us meant to do this alone, in suburban isolation, as a full-time intensive job of one, 24 hours a day 7 days a week with no help? I don’t think that’s sustainable for anyone, let alone a tamed free spirit like me, but here I am. That’s my life and I am mostly happy with it. At least when I can do a couple other things here and there, too.

I wonder if Mother’s Day is a kind of collective poking a hole in mothers’ lives to let some steam out so it doesn’t all explode out the top. Like, a bone thrown to say, yeah, we know it can kind of suck for you the other 364 days of the year, and while we spout platitudes about how you do the most important job of the year we don’t ACTUALLY want to support you or even truly respect you and what we do.

Even as we know it’s hard. And respectable. But here’s your Mother’s Day. Don’t be mad.

In graduate school, I dabbled in medieval studies. We talked about festivals that allowed servants a day of acting like their master, the social order upended for a day of zany craziness. It was like a release of a pressure valve. It was a nice way to keep the serfs in line. Here’s your brunch, peasant! Here’s a coupon for a free foot rub.

Or maybe I just need a babysitter.

(Production delayed)

Warning: shameless hussy selfies ahead. Also, I need to preemptively apologize because for reasons unknown to my conscious brain, this post was not written in respectable English, but rather a weird patois of textLOLbloggerFitFluentialspeak and I really don’t know why. Just live with it.

I’m sorta, kinda, starting to feel like my old self again. Which means: energy, more in shape, less dumpy and housebound, less a full time baby feeding machine with 30% body fat. (Not really, I have no idea what my body fat percentage is but it’s not Warrior O’Clock, that’s for sure.)

But not completely.

I attribute the beginning of the beginning of my mojo returning to all and sundry:

1. I’ve been able to run almost two months straight now with just a blip on the forced rest screen from The Bronchitis.

2. I’ve been getting to more strength training classes and even hit the weight room to try some full-on body bar chest dips. I need a lot of hardcore weight training to get my fitness back. I want to go back to beast mode. Pullups. BEAST mode needed.

3. I got some eyelash extensions on, courtesy of a friend who’s practicing before she opens her own eyelash shop.

4. I’m still trying new things and risking looking like a total spaz, all for the service of my writing career and my personal development. And then of course along the way I discover I really like New Thing and it made me Learn New Things, Too. It’s my own personal after school special. Except I’m not stoned this time.

5. The weather.

6. I’m undergoing the most necessary wardrobe overhaul in the history of womankind. But this one is still in progress because I really refuse to buy clothes until I’m at my normal size. So I’m going to make do with wearing flattering workout gear at all hours of the day.

7. I’m not sick any more. It’s amazing how adding a new problem and then taking away that problem makes your regular old status quo life seems easier than it was before. The next time I feel crappy I’m going to create an artificial annoyance, like pretending my car is in the shop for a day, just to feel better when it’s not any more. My kids are not sick and the preschooler is back to her sunny, lovely self which I’m very grateful for.

Also, I can taste beer again.

8. My road bike is tuned up and ready to be taken out for a ride. Not that I’ve DONE that yet but in my mind I feel like I have. I miss riding, so there’s that.

At this point, if there’s anything I can possibly do to get my old vim and vigor back, I’m trying it. I will apply copious scrubs and lotions, even. I’m sick of feeling like a dumpy mess. If I can’t run fast, maybe I can look cuter while I run slow. I even bid on some LuLuLemon on eBay. See what this has come to?

Any other ideas for groove recovery? Affairs with probably gay Jamaican men nowithstanding?

I. Got. Bronchitis.

And, yes, I got time for that. Since I have no choice.

Vector #1 (daughter Anna) brought a horrible adenovirus into our midst last week, and after a week of her being very sick and very, very unhappy, she’s better.

The baby is mostly better after getting an ear infection (and some more teeth, so he’s also very, very unhappy). My husband is hanging in with some mild coughing and a thrown out back. The dog is limping. This family is a mess.

I thought I was feeling better on Friday, finally. No more horrendous sore throat. So I was went for a run with the jogging stroller. It was hot. All the trees were blooming with their lovely allergens.

I felt fine while running. Stopped at Anna’s preschool to pick her up and then I started coughing. And I could not stop. I couldn’t breathe, just cough, this tight little dry cough that would not go away. A few moms looked at me with concern and noted my bright red face (well, yes, I was just running outside in the heat. I get red.) and said I sounded like I was having an asthma attack.

Really? I’ve never had anything remotely asthmatic happen to me. No bronchitis, no respiratory anything. I never even get sick, dammit. Until this year.

So I’m not running or exerting myself aerobically until I don’t have a dusky voice and a cough any more. I’m so mad. Y U MAD THO?! I was just getting on a roll again. And of course, here comes another stupid obstacle in my way. No wonder I can’t get into shape again. I take one step forward, three ridiculously annoying steps back.

I know improvement and fitness happens here. In these moments of having to adapt. It’s not what happens, it’s how you respond to it, blah blah blah. But I don’t feel like being adaptable. I feel like fucking running because I’m cranky. And incidentally, I’m sick of having this big mama body. I want my normal body back and I’d like to wear my old clothes again.

This dress is supposed to look cutesy, girly, and hipstery. When you are a curvy breastfeeding child bearing hipped mama, you look like you are a Duggar wearing modesty florals. Target Juniors clothes fail.

So the takeaway from this is that I have a bad attitude and I don’t care. I’m tired of rah-rah positivity. But I have no choice. I got bronchitis! I got time for that, I guess. So rah rah! Rest, time, comeback, rah rah!

Look! My baby is pulling up on crap and trying to let go. He has no spatial common sense. I’m in for a lot of boo boos.

He’s also either days, weeks, or months away from crawling properly. I say two weeks, husband thinks a month, Anna hedges with three weeks. Bets? He is planking, rocking on all fours and just teetering on the edge of throwing that arm in front.

So remember New York magazine’s highbrow-lowbrow matrix?

I realized that all my tastes in media and entertainment run consistently on the outside perimeters of taste. I love the lowest lowbrow and the highest highbrow and the stuff in the middle…is the stuff I don’t like.

I read Mother Jones and The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. I like funny gifs and memes. Like these.

I watch PBS, documentaries, Teen Mom and Buckwild on MTV. I usually hate 95% of the movies that are nominated for Best Picture Oscar. Like The Titanic. I hate stuff that’s pretentious. Just be actually good or just be actually funny. I’d rather watch either a really nerdy documentary, like Ken Burns or something, or Farrah the teenage mother waxing her daughter’s unibrow.

Is anyone else like this? What does this say about me?

I also never read fiction or novels. If I’m reading for fun, I always read non-fiction. Maybe because once upon a time, I read and analyzed literature and fiction as a job (that didn’t pay of course, I was an English PhD candidate.) Is that what ruined novels for me? When I met people at cocktail parties and the like and they found out what I was studying they always nicely asked, “What’s your favorite book?”

I never, ever, ever knew how to answer that question. It was like asking a computer programmer what their favorite programming command was. Erm, my favorite book to use to explore depictions of American femininity in 19th-century short stories? My favorite book to compare English language translations of? My favorite book to use in an essay on the historicist and Marxist origins of the novel?

Um, The Da Vinci Code?

So anyway, needless to be said, I impressed no one at these cocktail parties and went nowhere in life. Probably because I’m an INTP.

If you don’t know your Myers-Briggs profile, get to it now. It’s so fun and eerily accurate and will help you analyze your own personal strengths and weaknesses. An INTP like me is like the kid in the The Far Side comic that’s pushing the “pull” door to the school for the gifted.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to work on the things that don’t come naturally to me…not procrastinating, networking, tempering feats of logic with emotional I-talk, asking for directions (no, I never ask for directions. I’m your husband.) But so far skill at cocktail party self-promotional chatter eludes me.

I go from a grown-ass accomplished practical woman to Holden Caulfield if someone asks me my favorite movie.

“You’re all phonies!” Really gets you the jobs. Just kidding, I don’t say that, but saying you hate most movies and you’d rather watch Celebrity Rehab or documentaries doesn’t really work either. They want to hear that you loved some pretentious crap they just loved, too.

So maybe I should say, I loved “Children of Men! It made so much sense! I love anything with a dark blue filter on it to make it seem deeper and more brooding!”

What do you say when someone asks your favorite movie or book? Do your tastes run to the high, the middle or the low-brow?

So a few hours after I wrote my love song to the idea of the Boston Marathon, bombs went off and we all know the rest. I guess I have a lot of thoughts about everything that aren’t important, really. I mean, some are important like how it’s important to keep the justice system intact by applying it equally to every citizen no matter how beyond putrid of a worthless excuse of a human they are and how angry we are. I don’t know that I have the brainpower to do justice to my thoughts right now, so I’ll let my ramblings about the bombings just fester in my brain for now. The only thing I know how to write now is that I’m sorry for the victims and their families.

Now from the important to the criminally mundane. I don’t have any brainpower because we’re all really sick in the house. This is the year that viruses beat me. But this virus variety apparently came with a personality changing mechanism, since ever since my beautiful three-year-old daughter got sick last week, she’s turned into new little person, and not in a good way.

She got a personality transplant and she went from agreeable and sweet to…not so much. I hope it’s a symptom of the fatigue of getting over this bug. She’s been fever-free for a week but she still seems extremely tired and runny-nosed and nasty. She did take one dose of steroids for the croupy stuff she had going on. Can one dose of Prednisone permanently turn her into a roid raging preschooler? Can kids her age get mono?

Dr. Sweet?

The drug IS powerful stuff because I tried some of it out this weekend when my tonsils were so swollen I had to pep-talk myself into every swallow and it got me from wasting away on the couch to running five miles in the woods. I’m still sick which really sucks as I was, again, just getting into a regular groove of exercise and feeling more in shape. Why am I cursed by the fitness gods this year? Maybe I’ll do some more steroids.

Henry has what I think is his first ear infection and that’s no fun.

My sick, steroid-fueled run.

I hope the next time I post I’m not f***ing sick. We’ve been stuck in the house a lot and spring is here even though it’s freezing.

Here are some thoughts that are washing up on my wrecked beach of a brain today:

My baby is crazier than ever. Last night was one of the worst overall sleeps in the history of Henry ever. Six month old growth spurt? Teeth?

Yesterday, I attempted a five minute shower by placing him in a jumperoo with toys IN SIGHT OF ME and he went from zero to Red Alert Crying in three minutes to the point that he was hiccuping, hyperventilating and had to catch his breath.

Sucks to be me sometimes. Like that time. I find myself sinking into such a Why Me?! mindset at these moments. Like, if only I had a “normal” baby I would be so damn happy and productive. With a single one hour nap with him OUT of my arms, that’s all I would need. You’d never hear a peep or a complaint from me. Well, that’s a lie.

But still.

I mean, he’s cute and all, but that’s not everything in this world, is it?

Some other random things that happened last week: My baby was held and cooed over by the heirs to Hyundai. Maybe they’ll send us a new car?

I got my hair fixededed.

I grew a weird sun spot that is probably melanoma. Well, technically I won’t know what it is until I go to the doctor. I just hope I don’t have to forego the sun for the rest of my life. Wrong reaction to a suspicious mole, right?

I exercised.

Henry failed to impress the casting agents for YoBabyYogurt because he bumped his head and got mad as the Dickens during his test shoot.

Anna and Henry ran rampant in FAO Schwartz.

I saw my first mosquito and taught Anna the Macarena.

Our old garage makes our yard look like Dolly Parton’s birthplace or something. Spring sprung, we walked a lot, I cried and yelled a lot (normal) and wrote a bunch. I ran twice, Spun once on Real Ryder bikes, and did a strength class. I’m going to try another double gym day care adventure today.

I just realized that I never wrote about my trip to Rhode Island a while back. So I made a photo collage instead.

So I’d like to complain about some things that will make you want to throttle me and send me on a two-week volunteer vacation to Rwanda to remind me that my life is great and I shouldn’t complain about a damn thing.

I know my life is great. I love it. That’s why it’s my life! See?

But anyway. I’m really busy and this blog has been neglected lately in favor of paying writing work (slap me). I love paying writing work. I just got a free massage and spa treatment to write about spa parties (throw something at my head). But the massage was terrible! I had wicked Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness because I finally made it to Elevated Training which is the best class ever and the massage didn’t even remotely address a single aching muscle. It was like a skin tickle.

Do people actually like their massages that light?

Good thing when I’m on my own dime I frequent the bare bones, dirt cheap, semi-illegitimate Chinese place with a strong, silent guy who applies so much pressure I get Delayed Onset Massage Soreness for a day and then I feel great. It hurts so good.

I think the more expensive the spa, the crappier the massage. I do wish I could find a decent English-speaking sports-massage oriented person or place so I can explain that I need extra help in certain areas. When I tell my Tui-Na buddy he nods enthusiastically and then completely ignores my request due to incomprehension.

In more ungrateful whining, I’m also really busy because I have two beautiful, smart, fun children of both equally delightful genders. But one refuses to nap out of my arms. He’s sleeping in my arms right now and my foot is asleep. It may never come back to life. If I try to place him so gently down into a container of my choosing, he wakes up. Instantly.

I also have a stupid dog that doesn’t stop barking. He barks at people, trucks, visitors, mail carriers, cyclists, joggers, walkers, skateboarders, squirrels, rabid racoons, semi-rabid racoons, regular racoons, flies he can’t catch, noises that go bump in the night, his water bowl when it’s too empty, and at the back door to go outside so he can bark some more out there. And it’s always just when the baby has fallen asleep (not that he was going to stay asleep anyway, who am I kidding? Or at the arse-crack of dawn, robbing us all of another hour or two of sleep. My precious! Sleep!)

It’s very hard to train a dog NOT to do something. It’s much harder to reward an action than the absence of an action. I vaguely remember watching a dog training show with a severe red-headed British dominatrix who carried some kind of bullwhip and sternly admonished her clients to stop anthropomorphizing their pets.

“It’s a DOG!” My husband loves to go around saying, imitating her upper-crust incredulity at the stupid sad-sack Americans who give their obese pugs macaroni and cheese “because it’s their favorite!”

If I say anything remotely New Age-y about Finn, he reminds me:

It’s a DOG!!!!

In my case, a stubborn, annoying one. I’ve resorted to threatening to spray him with water. I only actually wet him once and now the sight of the bottle is enough to quiet him. Which is interestingly enough how the threat of time-out works with my three-year-old. She’s only ever gone to time-out once in two years of threatening it as punishment but I must use it as a threat 3-5 times per week.

It never fails.

Probably because the single worst punishment for an extreme extrovert like Anna is to be away from everyone. See how I’m using her delicate, delightful personality as a weapon against her? This is like Special-Ops level of psychological warfare here.

So what does Finn love more than anything? Peanut butter? I try to give him treats when he doesn’t bark in a bark-y situation like someone coming to the door but my problem is mostly when I’m away from the scene of the crime (say, upstairs with a sleeping kid or two) and he starts barking. I can’t stop him. I need a remote-controlled peanut butter/water dispenser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AftWvTBWte0

Anyone ever train a hunting, sadly-ruled-by-their-primitive instincts, dog like mine to not bark so much?