Getting to know you, getting to know all about you....

I am now breaking out into show tunes, but for good reason! This line says so much for how I feel about Noah lately. This past week his personality has exploded! He is jibbering and jabbering constantly and while half the time he sounds like he is speaking in some slavic tongue, I can now make out more words. He is also becoming a little ham, pretending his diaper rash cream is a phone and exclaiming "ulloooo da da" into it. He shakes his head no all the time and makes super silly faces. He is becoming his own little person! Since my "operation de-frump" I have become more enthusiastic about making each day count which equals Noah watching less Sesame Street and spending more hands on time with him. I have been having such a great time , laughing, loving, and savoring the last moments of his babyhood which will probably be gone before I know it!  Today it is snowing here in NY, and I plan to break out the crayons since he has never done "art" before, I'll let you know if he is a future Picasso or maybe a Jackson Pollack? 

And an aside..I just realized when posting the "10 honest facts", I had already posted about six of the same facts during a past post. Guess I better get some more interesting tid bits, lol! 

10 honest things about me...

I got my first "blog award" from Ellen over at To the Max, so YAY and thanks. I have done a few of these "meme" things before and although I am still not clear what "meme" even means or stands for, here goes:

10 Honest things about me-

1) I really wanted a baby girl when I was pregnant with Noah. So much so that I prayed, wished, hoped, begged, for the baby to be a girl. At the time I was incredibly naive and assumed I would have a perfectly healthy baby so I selfishly spent all my time praying for girly parts when I should have been praying for healthy parts. on June 18th, 2007 I found out my dream baby had a penis. I was very disappointed and so was my hubby, however when I had a 4D Ultrasound a few months later I fell in love with Noah's little face and instantly felt ridiculous for "wanting" anything other than what was growing inside of me. When he was born so sick I felt like I was being punished for being so stupid!

2) I HATE my nose. I have a big ol' italian nose that has caused me grief for as long as I can remember. I always wanted to have a nose job but never had an extra 10 grand lying around. I still dislike it but have learned to live with it, other things have definitely taken precedence! 

3) My husband and I met when I was 18, he was my first everything ( sorry for being brutally honest). I didn't plan it like that, just so happened I met my soul mate as a teenager and ended up marrying him! Sometimes I am embarrassed to admit this, but my hubby thinks it's "special", ::wink wink::, ha ha ha! 

4) Noah was named after the main character in the book " The Notebook". I read it in college and fell in love with the name. I remember telling my husband ( boyfriend at the time) about the name since I always loved to name our "future children". He responded that he HATED it and would not name our kid after a stupid book. Welll....thankfully my husband forgot that conversation and I mentioned the name when I was pregnant ( without mentioning the notebook) and he went for it, thus our little Noah Joseph =)

5) I did not eat cheese of any kind until I was 25. I hated cheese all my life and as a kid would break out into hysterics of cheese went anywhere near my food. It was actually a great diet trick! However for some reason on my honeymoon in Mexico I tried it and fell in love, but still can only eat cheese if it is melted.

6) Despite popular belief I was named after my great-grandmother, not Pia Zadora!

7) When I was learning to drive my dad took me for a spin around the neighborhood. I had on these ridiculously crazy platform shoes ( remember the 70's came back in the late 90's?). The shoe got caught on the gas pedal and as I was attempting to pull into a gas station so my dad could get the paper, I freaked, and drove IN TO the building. Everyone came running out, all the stuff on the shelves on the side of the building I hit got knocked off, luckily no one was injured! Needless to say after that incident I got "professional" driving lessons!

8) Lately I feel I am a bad therapist. My heart is not really in it anymore. Sometimes I am so preoccupied I have a hard time listening to the kids when my mind is racing about my own kid. The struggle of a working mom in the human service field perhaps? I can't wait to get my photography business started up in the summer!

9) I am one of those people that has a really dirty, crazy, silly sense of humor. Me and my girlfriends talk about some craaazzzyyy shit, especially when wine is involved!

10) Sometimes I sing like a maniac in the car, music blasting, I always think if someone saw me they would have me committed! 

Me myself and I

The new year, a new age ( big 2*8*), I am feeling refreshed. 

Yesterday I actually dressed in a pre-pregnancy shirt circa 2007. I wore matching earrings. I wore heels. Oh and I wore my hair down. I didn't shave my legs but that will be our secret. Everyone at work noticed. This leads me to believe being a frump wasn't just my secret, it was public knowledge. Truth be told I felt good. I felt attractive. I felt renewed. This in itself is cause for celebration. 

But on top of just working on the physical me, I feel other aspects of me are growing, evolving, changing. I feel like I have hit a new milestone of maturity. Maybe 28 is a good year for me? I have said before, lately I have highs and lows and it just so happens if the pattern continues, 2009 should be a "high" year...

I have made a pact with myself. I need to change. I need to motivate. I need to move forward. Not just one foot in front of the other but leaps and bounds. My work has suffered. My marriage has suffered. My idea of "motherhood" has suffered. It is time to take control of the reigns and there is not better time than now. 

Today is a new day, a new start, today is the first day of the rest of my life. I will make it a good one! 

Stoned

No I didn't party too much on my birthday. When I say "stoned" I am referring to the glorious hot stone massage my hubby surprised me with yesterday! It was a lovely day, my husband and I went shopping, had lunch, and then it was off to the spa for me. When I tell you that this massage was heavenly, it's an understatement! For 60 minutes I was in such a state of relaxation I can not even explain how good it felt. I have had other massages before but the hot stone is definitely something everyone needs to try. After my massage we all went out to dinner ( my parents and Noah joined us) and to my surprise I had the best drink ever, the sangria margarita..for those who know me let's just say it's the combo of my dreams, lol.  In all seriousness it was just so nice to have a "normal" carefree birthday. Last year I was SUCH a wreck, my hubby had sent me to the same spa and I spent the entire massage worrying that my 8 week old was going to have a seizure back at home with my mother in law ( see I told you I was crazy back then!) Reflecting back is so nice to see where I was and how far we have come. I couldn't have asked for a better 28th birthday gift!

OH and one more thing...

I love Ellen's blog ( lovethatmax.blogspot.com) . First off Max is a doll, and Ellen writes in a way that is not only very amusing, but also deeply touching. So as a loyal blog reader I have decided to particpate in her blog "meme" or whatever it's called, titled: What's your favorite room in your house". 

This is not my favorite room per say, but rather my husbands, and since he is so proud of it, so am I. A little bit of background info is that my hubby does kitchens and baths. He designs them, helps build them, does a little of everthing. He works for my uncle in the family buisness and would someday like to call it his own. This picture isn't too clear but since we have only lived here a few months, it's all I got. My husband designed and helped install this kitchen. He did the wood floors all by himself. It was a miserable few months since he was at the house constantly but it was sooo worth it. My husband can really say his blood sweat and some tears when into making this our home! I have gourmet appliances and heat up chicken tenders for dinner half the time. Rachel Ray would cringe!! 

My favorite room sans picture is our bedroom. It is my sanctuary. I feel at peace at night cuddled in bed with Noah and my husband watching tv. The jacuzzi tub in my bathroom doesn't hurt either. I love making this new house our home. 

was it really 10 years ago???

I will be 28 on Sunday. I can do the math. I have been an adult "legally" for almost 10 years. 10 years ago I was about to turn 18. On my 18th birthday I used a fake i.d., got wasted, and subsequently kicked out of a bar. Was that really that long ago? Gaahh...it seems like yesterday and in a way it seems like forever ago. Hell...I was just thinking that for my birthday 2 years ago my hubby and I went for a romantic getaway, the last of it's kind for awhile. We were trying to conceive Noah and I had my clear blue easy fertility sticks packed away with my bikini. Life appears to be on speed dial. This year there will be no getting kicked out of bars or romantic getaways. The big plan for Sunday is to drop Noah off with my parents, spend the day shopping with my hubby, then dinner and cake at my favorite Mexican Restaurant ( you bet I will be having my fill of margaritas) . Simple and ordinary which is how I prefer things these days.

All joking aside, I am really feeling very sentimental lately about life passing me by. Truth be told I am aging, which is inevitable, and in a way very surreal.  My 20's which were a whirlwind in itself are nearing an end. My youth and all it's carefree goodness is a thing of the past. What will my 30's bring? My high school reunion is nearing at the end of this year. So what else is there left to do before I officially leave the 20's behind....Party like it's 1999 of course!!!! 

Things that make you go hmm...

I like to think of myself as a good person. I think I am kind, hell I am a social worker who makes crappy money and deals with a lot of crazy stuff. I like my job. I have never committed any (major) crimes ( haha). I love my family, my husband, my baby. I think I am a good friend. See...there you have it, a good person. 

So when I got a crazy response from an old friend on facebook ( I am so cool, my first facebook fight), I was taken aback and can't seem to shake it. I will give you come background info: This girl who I will call "J" and I were really close friends in high school and the beginning of college. J actually introduced me to my hubby and set us up. I started dating my husband, she got heavy into the party scene and we grew apart, still keeping in touch. A few years went by and we hadn't spoken in about a year. I bump into J at the mall and we reconnect. I get engaged. J is a bridesmaid in my wedding. A year later J is a bridesmaid in my best friends wedding. So from about 2004 until september 2006 J and I remain friends, not really close but in contact sporadically. Then she sort of fell off the face of the planet. March 2007 I find out I am pregnant. It was really awkward calling J since we hadn't spoken in about 5 months. I e-mail J telling her I am pregnant and we need to connect. I never hear back from her. My brother runs into J at a bar about 5 months later and she tells him what a bitch i was for never telling her about my pregnancy. J claims she never got my e-mail. At the time I was pissed, I tried to make amends with her but she kept insisting I never e-mailed her, which I did. I bump into her in the mall (again) when I am about 8 months pregnant. She starts crying, asks me when my shower is because she wants to come. This is the shitty part. My shower was the weekend BEFORE. On the spot I lied and told her I sent her an invite, it was the weekend before. I assumed she didn't want to come because she was mad. It was an obvious lie but I didn't know what to say. 

I promised to call J when I had Noah, and I honestly had all intentions to do so but then well...Noah's birth took an unexpected detour causing me to crash off my rocker and well, you know the rest. So a couple days ago I was thinking about J, the past, and sent her a message on facebook asking her to give me a call, I wanted I catch up. Her response shocked me. It was cold, nasty, and downright mean. I literally wanted to cry. It really made me think...am I a bad, selfish person? Did having Noah and being pregnant consume my every being and make me self centered? Time for some self reflection!

The mom wars

You know that new movie with Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway? The one where they are best friends getting married and fighting over a wedding date at the plaza ( I think it's the plaza anyway) ? ...The movie that looks ridiculous but also looks slightly amusing and some deep down part of me wants to see? Yeah that movie. 

 

Well the preview for it got me thinking. Bride Wars? Mom Wars are so much more extreme. I mean, a wedding is one day, your child is your life. 

I had been warned about this sort of thing pre-baby. I knew it would happen and knew it was only a matter of time. When Noah had all those issues with his brain I felt the constant need to show people what he could do, what milestones he had reached, and how smart he was. I was constantly validating his "normalness" . I thought that this quirk was unique to my situation but with the birth of my friends kids shortly thereafter, I realized this was the Mom Wars, the competition that we all embark on between our kid and the rest of em'. 

I am really not too bad with this. Seriously. I have gotten over the initial panic about Noah's development and proudly did NOT buy " What to Expect the toddler years" ( although I was tempted)  I am chill now. Well sometimes anyway. 

My good friend is the one who inspired this post. She is bad. Before we had kids I would not have pinned her as the Mom Wars "type". In fact, she was a heck of a lot more lax than me...Truth be told however, she is the worst. Example: Her daughter is almost 9 months old- she is adorable, super chubby, and a super good baby.  This baby is a sweet marshmallow. However, in my friends world her kid can say FIVE words??? Seriously...she coo's...and my friend counts it as a word.  The Mom Warrior in me wants to snap back that it is NOT a word, that Noah bearly has 5 words... but I don't. I am proud of myself. I let her gloat and brag, and compete, because really, what are we competing for? 

Is this really what we do? Brag about our kids, stretch the truth, need to have the smartest, cutest, most well adjusted kid on the playground? Seriously, this parenting shit is craazzyyy sometimes. 

a baby, maybe?

The whole "when to have another" thing has been on my mind practically since Noah was born. I am ashamed to admit this but immediately after all the trauma that occurred with his birth, I felt I needed to get pregnant again. In hindsight it was as if I was looking for a do-over. Logically and rationally I can now see how utterly and totally unhealthy that would have been but in the midst of all my craziness it sounded good.

So now we are past that. Wheewww. Thinking more clearly and I said more because I never think completely clearly, I have a little plan devised in my head. My husband and I actually had a great talk about this last night and it got me thinking. So what is our plan? Enjoy the spring and summer as a family of three. We live in a great area, nestled in the mountains or "gunks" as they are referred to by the locals. We jog, we bike..or we did anyway before pregnancy and kids took their toll on our bodies! We want to get back to that, and a big ol' belly and/or morning sickness definitely doesn't fit in with that plan. I would also like to enjoy a margarita or three this summer and possibly even reach for the impossible dream of wearing a bikini again ( although I was one of those woman who did this when they were 8 month pregnant!) In August hopefully I will be ready, refreshed, and gearing up for what will probably be the most nerve wracking 40 weeks of my life!

When I think about pregnancy this time around it makes my heart flutter. I am so nervous. Nervous actually doesn't even describe it. In a way I am angry. Angry at this being my "pregnancy experience" although the "big girl" in me knows this is selfish, pregnancy is about the baby not about an "experience". So onward we trek, and until August only "safe sex" for me =)

14 months

Wow. Has it really been two months since the big day ? And when I mean big day I am referring to the day my baby became a toddler. Time is seriously flying. My mother always told me that when you have kids things go by, faaassst. To say this is an understatement. Wasn't I just pregnant??  Didn't I just have a newborn? 

My brother and I was 23 months apart. Growing up I always planned on having my kids just like me and my brother. In my mind it was the "perfect" age gap and sounded like a "perfect plan". If you do the math you can figure out that I was 14 months old when my mom got pregnant. Hmmm. Yeah. Umm. Totally rethinking "perfect" and totally rethinking that plan!  Even when Noah was a newborn, this was the plan. I just hadn't counted on 14 months which back then felt like an eternity, going by so damn quickly! Ehh, plans are made to be broken, right? 

In Noah news, 14 months is nothing mind blowing, just pretty much the same as 12 and 13 months but with a few more gestures/ "words" and thank god for a slightly bigger appetite. Oh and we had a record breaker the other night. Ready for this? At a whopping 14 months Noah slept from 8pm until 6am. Yes folks, it only took over a year for my baby to truly sleep through the night. Honestly at this point, I'll take it!  Oh and he now bends down to pick things up when he is walking which has resulted in one too many nose dives onto the tile, resulting in an even more astounding "rudolph the red nosed reindeer" look. 

Ohhh and yes I got my period. PMS was the result of my slightly nutty panicked post below. For the next 14 days or so I should be much more cheery and even keeled. 

Blah blah blog

I haven't really had the "itch" to write lately, not sure why. Maybe it is because I have been sick as a dog and am finally recovering from my ear infection and double pink eye, or maybe because I am starting to become anxious again...or maybe just a combo of a bunch of things!  When I say anxious I mean that things feel just too good to be true. Noah is good. We are good. Is it really that simple? I found a blog about a little girl who was just diagnosed with a rare metabolic disorder ( check out littlemisshannah.com to read more). 

As some of you know a metabolic issue was one of the things "thrown" around when I had Noah. We had some blood tests done last spring which came back mostly normal but did show an elevated liver something or other. The geneticist felt he didn't need to see us again but did have us re-do the blood test to re-check the liver thing, I never heard back from the (august) and assumed all was well. Well  since reading about all these horrible degenerative childhood metabolic diseases I have been wracking my brain, worrying and obsessing. A lot of the really bad ones involve the liver. So now I am scared. I plan on talking to the pediatrician at his 15 month appointment next month and I am sure it is probably nothing and if it was that bad the geneticist wouldn't have sent us on our merry way...but and there is always a BUT, it just sucks to worry about these things!

Sometimes I feel like when things are too good to be true I find things to worry about, it seems to be a pattern with me. Will it ever end? Or will I need to spend my life savings on therapy to figure it all out???

MakeOVER and UNDER the weather....

I have decided that I have completely and totally let myself go. I was always the exercise freak who counted every calorie, wouldn't drink a beverage unless is was water, wine, or diet something or other and who walked every.single.day. Throughout my pregnancy I ate good, exercised literally up until the week before I had Noah, and gained the textbook 30 pounds. Once Noah was born and things went south, I stopped eating because well, I was depressed. The lack of eating coupled with breastfeeding helped me to shed 23 of the 30 pounds I have gained in a record breaking 2 weeks. I went back to work in february and everyone oggled over how good I looked. Wellllll....I assumed the last 7 pounds would slide off as easy as the first 23, and I started eating WHATEVER I wanted, WHENEVER I wanted and now, post-holiday's, I am both afraid to get on the scale and assume I weigh more than I did 2 weeks post-partum, ughh. 

This is where my makeover kicks in. I am determined to lose at least 10 pounds by May ( the month we will most likely TTC) . I am also going to stop putting my hair up into the messy, unbrushed looking, "bun" every morning, I will iron my cloths so I don't go to work looking like I am homeless...oh, and I will shave my legs at least every other day and tweeze my eyebrows once a week. Wheewww....I am tired already! 

I will be 28 in 2 weeks, and honestly, I look at pictures of myself on my honeymoon 3 years ago and pictures of me now and I appear to have aged 10 years! I have fine lines...me....I could actually use some under eye cream!!!  I also found a grey hair not to long ago...parenthood...look what it does to ya'!

So that is the makeOVER part. The UNDER the weather part is that I have had flu like symptoms including a fever of almost 103 for almost 2 weeks now. I was feeling better and then out of no where yesterday I started feeling achy and now how a terrible sore throat. So while mentally I feel great, physically I want to crawl under a rock and sleep for 3 days. This is making tweezing and shaving rather difficult but I am proud to say that this morning I not only shaved but used Avocado Essence shave gel. And while I have to admit the name made me suddenly crave guacamole, I did feel a bit nostalgic for the 25 year old newlywed I once was!

Happy 2009

I have to say that New Years Eve was wonderful, spent just the three of us, cozy and simple. We went out to dinner around 6ish, came back home and played for a bit, then it was off to bed for Noah and into the jacuzzi for me and my hubby. Of course we were dozing at around 10:30 so we set the alarm for 11:45. Sure enough we had fallen asleep and I awoke just as the count down was beginning. My husband isn't one for the whole ball dropping thing so we was still half asleep. 

As everyone was counting down I starting crying. That is the first time in my 27 years that New Years Eve made me cry. At that moment I just felt so happy, so thankful, and so optimistic about the future. It may sound super cheesy but it was a really great moment. Our neighbor started setting off fireworks that I could see from my bed, it was just so so nice! About 2 minutes later Noah woke up and wanted to nurse, and as I held him in our bed, looking out at the stars, I felt peace.

I have a lot of "work" to do in the new year, work on myself as an individual since that has really taken a back seat since becoming a mother. I would love to shed those last 10 baby pounds I have lingering, I want to "de-frump", make some more time for my husband. We shall see how it goes, but for now I am sitting in my robe, eating cinnamon bread because well...the diet starts tomorrow!

Happy New Year to all!