Lately I’ve been going through major music/concert withdrawal. One of my best friends who moved away temporarily, will be going to a Jimmy Gnecco show next week in Austin, Texas and I wish I was with her. I’m dying for some live Jimmy right now. I’ve read his most recent diary post on his website (www.jimmygnecco.com) and he said he’s been dealing with a lot of stuff recently, and listed one of those items as his mom passing away. I knew about it already, but him saying it out loud made me think of how I’ve been really thinking about my dad a lot lately also. I really wish he could have seen my daughter (”The Diva”) crawl, cruise, & babble away like she does now. Both my dad and Jimmy’s mom died from lung cancer in November 2009. He did a benefit show awhile back to raise money for her health bills, and at a show before that, we talked a little about dealing with seeing our parents with cancer, and how much is sucks. Anyway, all that makes me feel closer to his music right now, so I’ve been listening to a lot of his solo music and Ours. I also have been addicted to a song from Lukas Rossi’s “Unreleased Demos” album, “Wherever You’re Going.” That song hits me like a brick wall and feels like he wrote it through my eyes, or hand rather. It deals with cancer, so don’t listen to it unless you want to bawl or are into that sort of thing. I’m drawn to dark, depressing stuff, so I love it. I’d love to know who inspired that song for him.

I can’t believe my daughter is already 13 months old. Craziness. At 12 months she started cruising, and can now walk “along the wall” by pressing up against it, kind of like a cop in a movie who goes outside the window of a 20-story building to try and talk a “jumper” out of jumping. You know how he presses against the wall for dear life? Yeah, that’s what she does. As for feeding, I was nursing her 3x a day, and planned to stop breastfeeding when she turned 12 months, but we’re a little delayed, which is fine. The trouble was that she would not drink cow’s milk. She spit it out and refused to open her mouth for the cup. Finally this week, after a suggestion from a friend, I mixed in some yogurt or Gerber Yogurt-Juice with the whole milk and now she drinks it. I’m thrilled because I was able to cut out her mid-day nursing and replace it with cow’s milk. So now I just nurse her when she wakes up, and right before bed. I hear these last 2 can be a pain to wean children from, so we’ll see how that goes. Once she’s off of breast milk/nursing for good, I can’t wait to drop her off at her grandma’s house to spend the night! Haha..does that sound horrible? I can’t imagine being able to sleep in, but it sounds wonderful. Today I was playing the piano and she cruised right over and started hitting the keys, so I put her on my lap and we played together. She lasted a good 5 minutes before she kept trying to tear down my sheet music. Oh well. She has a longer attention span for guitar. She loves to pluck the strings and she hasn’t broke any yet, so that’s a plus. I still think she’ll wind up a drummer though. It’s always hard to find a drummer, so we’d be thrilled.

I think I finally started to enjoy being a mom, at least a little bit, when my daughter was about 1 month old. Before then, I confess it was the most stressed I’ve ever been in my life. She cried non-stop from colic, I was severely sleep deprived, and I actually weighed less than I did before I was pregnant because I didn’t have any time to eat.  But once she was 1 month old I finally was rewarded with that first “real” smile, you know, the non-gas kind, which made it seem worth it. She has two huge dimples and a really wide face so she truly looked like a Gerber baby; a cherub. Where that cherub was from remains a question because she definitely wasn’t an angel baby. Haha.

My husband and I would sing to her almost daily, everything from nursery songs to Stone Temple Pilots. One morning I was singing to her and she just started babbling back. But it wasn’t her normal babbling that she did throughout the day. This was a specific babble that she does while being sung to, like a trill almost, and she would go up and down the scale. It’s really funny to watch because she’d belt out an off-key note and hold it while her eyebrows came together, like she’s REALLY concentrating on the note, or maybe she was just trying to poop, who knows. She would always “sing” whenever my husband or I would sing to her. But she also would babble a lot throughout the day, like she was talking to you about everyday stuff. Some of my friends’ babies weren’t really babbling much yet, so this was one area which she seemed to do early.

As a parent of a baby, my newest interest became baby poop. The amount, the frequency, the consistency, the color, etc. When they send you home from the hospital with your baby they want you to pay attention to poop, and I don’t think you ever stop paying attention to it!  If you were to put two very new mothers together, especially breastfeeding mothers, the conversation would quickly turn to this subject. Her poop was mostly the standard watery, yellow, mustard-seed poop that breastfed babies produce. But every now and then she’d have dark green, mucousy poop, and there would be tiny (and I do mean tiny) streaks of blood in it. It scared me to death! The doctor said that babies sometimes can have a little tearing from pooping so frequently, or that it could be a sensitivity to something I was eating. They said that dairy is usually the culprit, so I cut back on my dairy intake again. It seemed to help.

Unfortunately, she still didn’t sleep. She was sleeping a little at night, but naps were pretty much non-existent. I didn’t know about schedules or anything at the time, so I wasn’t aware about trying to put her on one. She fell asleep in her bouncy seat when she was tired during the day, and when she did sleep it was only for maybe 20-30 minutes. I always thought that the only thing young babies did mostly was sleep, at least that’s what everybody told me and what was portrayed on some episodes of the TV show Bringing Home Baby, but not my daughter. She never slept. That’s why I never had time to eat, cook, clean, or do anything else. This was another area where I tended to get a little jealous of my friends’ “easy” babies, versus my little diva.

I was still successfully breastfeeding, which I was really proud about considering how hard it was for me. I think it paid off because when she went to her 1st month check-up at the doctor, she was in the 95th percentile in height/weight at 11 lbs and 23 inches. I didn’t realize how big she was until the doctor laughed and said that she’s considered a huge baby, but not to worry about her being an Amazon Woman when she’s older because they can’t tell that until children are about 2 years old. That didn’t  reassure me much, but at least she wasn’t overly small. I’d rather her be a big baby than an overly small baby. The only issue that her height/weight presented to me was clothing. It killed me inside that she was only able to wear some items once, or not at all, because she quickly outgrew everything. This child had gorgeous outfits that people had given her, but she couldn’t wear a lot of them. I’m dealing with the mental torture of that by holding onto them and hoping that if I ever have another child that it will be a girl. This way I’ll feel like the clothing was used more.