Gilly and the Pita Family

Sorry Nonni and Grandaddy-we ate you for dinner...but it was all for the best. You got to go to the party in our tummies, after all....

Reading time

Gillian went through a Very Unfortunate Phase where, for two months, she was waking up between 5 and 5:30 am for the day. Besides the obvious way that this puts a cramp in one's style (and level of exhaustion, and mood), she was falling asleep during morning errands and not sleeping particularly well or long at nap time (and on my work days, this was consistently making me late). We kept making excuses for why this was happening (going to big bed, moving rooms, the holidays, teeth...), but I finally consulted with my sleep bible. It is true that a weird pattern emerged where she would wake up and request watching her two episodes of Little Einsteins-every day, earlier and earlier. We would stagger into the living room, put the episode on and stagger back to bed. I can see why she loves the show-we love the show-it's incredibly creative, and very encouraging re: developing a musical ear...we were hooked when the episode came on that began in Cremona, Italy (birthplace of Antonio Stradivari and Niccolo Amati) where a "Mama Cello" had five baby cellos. One fell into a river and got lost. The episode is about the mission of helping the baby cello find his Mama. Anyway, back on track-after consulting my sleep bible (which I credit solely with Gillian's mostly excellent sleep habits since we did Cry It Out at 6 months old), I realized she was waking earlier and earlier to watch Little Einsteins. The book warned about that with using the TV to extend your own sleep or to watch your child while you get ready for work (which I use to be appalled by, but can kind of see the logic now). The Book recommended a couple of options: 1) keep putting the child back in her bed over and over and over until she understands that it's not time to get up yet; 2) ignore her when she comes to your room ready to play; or 3) get an alarm clock with a big display, write the time that is an appropriate wake time on a piece of paper next to the clock and tell the child they can leave their room when it is XX o'clock (they said this is best used on a child that is 3 or older because of their ability to understand what you are telling them).

We opted for a hybrid of options 2 and 3. Option 1 sounded like too much work. Off Gillian and I went to Target to find her clock. She picked it out. I wrote, in large text "7:00" and taped it to the drawer under the clock,which was strategically positioned for easy viewing from her bed. For the following two weeks we pulled her into bed when she got up super early and told her it was still nighttime and it wasn't time to wake up yet (and I quote: "it's not time to wake up yet-it's not 7:00!"). When she protested, we told her she could stay and sleep or snuggly quietly in our bed or she would have to go back to her own room. We have a spare pillow in our bed for her and it usually happened that she chose to stay in our bed. After she got situated, she usually tried to start a conversation. After that, we ignored her and she usually ended up falling back to sleep. For the past two weeks, she doesn't even bother us until her clock says "7:00" or later. She comes in and says, "It's time to wake up! It's SEVEN O'CLOCK!"

From the mouths of babes

The funny thing about little kids is how they process their world. I constantly find myself listening to my little observer, thinking "I need to write down these things because they're priceless". For example, Gillian is convinced she is also pregnant. Here is why.

About three weeks ago, she was inspecting my breasts, as she is wont to do on occasion to say hello (and oftimes request I leave them with her while I go do X, which is usually an excuse for me to get up to not be groped anymore), she noticed my belly button was completely out. To this, she asked her favorite question, "What happened, Mama? What happened to your bellybutton?". I explained to her that sometimes when a baby gets bigger and bigger, a woman's belly button gets pushed so much from the inside that it pops and sticks out. Gillian, who has always had the cutest of outies, then inspected her own belly and made the rational conclusion that she, too, must have a baby in her tummy getting bigger and bigger, because her belly button "popped out to the sky like a rocket, Mama!" This morning, during our morning snuggle time, she lifted her shirt, pulled the top of her diaper away and said "look, Mama! the baby is moving!!" (ok, this clearly came from me...my child is a parrot!). Then she snuggled with "our baby" and laid her head on my stomach and talked and sang to her baby sister (who began moving around in response).

She is also currently fascinated with Tums, and with my taking them for the heartburn that has already begun (we're only 21 weeks!). Tonight she told me that she will pretend to take one too, since "[her] belly is getting bigger and bigger because of the baby, and it is making [her] tummy upset".

She continues telling stories of Events That Never Happened, such as the fine tale (with intimate details) of how she drove to the store today to buy cookies, or how a mouse got lost and had to find his family in a castle (a creative patchwork of several storylines of Little Einsteins mixed together), or about how she and Monika (Anna's daughter, who is in school and is hardly ever here) chased the cat and the cat "bit [them] both on the eyes" and they had to go to the doctor in an ambulance. I should write these down every day, but I don't. Gillian does not lack the Gift of Gab.

You might also be interested to know that her vagina continues to yawn, regularly. I have no idea where that came from, but I love it.

Tradition

This year, Gillian helped me make our crawfish etouffe. Most years, I am feverishly making enough to feed 50 for our Samedi Gras party, but this year it's all for us. Last year the poor weather resulted in a turnout was about half the usual, and we realized it was a bit much with everything on our plates at the moment. So, we are opting for an intimate dinner with a few friends in lieu of the grande fête this year. At any rate, Gilly and I cooked together. We often cook together, but this is special. This year, we made a Charbonnet family tradition our own and we made our roux with mounds of delicious butter and flour (Gillian was concerned, initially when I told her we were going to cook flour...but I realized why when she said, very worriedly, "I don't wanna cook the flowers!!"...her fears were soothed when I showed her that this was a different kind of flour for cooking). Gillian was quite pleased to have her very own pot next to mine (I cook batches separately as to not water them down) and enjoyed watching the butter melt and the roux turn and adding more butter and "stir-stir-stirring!". We cooked our "holy trinity" and accompanying spices in the roux and added the liquid, which includes clam juice and more spices (including Tabasco, of course). Last part was adding the crawfish tail meat, and then letting the batch sit overnight to absorb the complexity of the flavors.

Last year I made the mistake of buying my butter at the corner market. I feel like it affected the quality of the roux and the overall flavor of the etouffe. It just wasn't as rich and the sauce seemed a little thin. This year, we went with the Gold standard of butter, whose cream content is beyond question. It looked and smelled rich and full of fat, like God intended. It tastes even better!!

Mama and G melting butter:

Gillian adding flour (not flowers) to the butter for browning to make the roux:

Browning the roux with constant stirring:

Starting to brown:

Adding the trinity + spices to saute in the roux:

Mixing the ingredients for part II:

She really like stirring, and she's very good at it :-):

The finished product-Mmmmmmmmmmm......delicious!

Some of Gillian's favorite things right now, in no particular order

1. Nonni and Grandaddy
2. This. It can make her clear her plate, sit in avid anticipation with her mouth agape gasping, and then giggle in sheer glee when the banjo starts:

3. Making friends with things that are not alive. Today at the Cajun jam, it was a chrome trash can (for the greater portion of 10 minutes she stood with her arm around it). You have heard and seen such classics as Toast Friend (a loaf of bread) at the grocery store and beyond, the Flower friend, etc. Personifying hands and feet, fingers and toes (feet can get bottles and be cuddled and rocked like a baby, toes can be sad or happy, can be mamas or babies, and hands can be ducks or "Ra-ra"s).
4. Hot dogs and macaroni and cheese
5. Little Einsteins

6. Her boopies (trifold diapers/lovies)
7. Music
8. Bottles at bedtime (I know, this has to stop...but it guarantees vitamins and hydration, which her birdlike eating makes me worry she's not getting enough of either).
9. Shoes- any style or color.
10. Painting her toenails or drawing people's attention to her "pretty red toes".
11. Dancing
12. Playgrounds
13. Hamming it up for anyone, anywhere.
14. Bedtime
15. Snuggling
16. Torturing the cats
17. Reading
18. Eyeball kisses
19. Drawing and painting
20. Lammy

Thoughts I am Struggling with Today

As I age, I observe my ideology about a number of things changing. Abortion, a powerfully polarizing issue, is one of those. The other day, I saw an article about a "botched abortion" of a 23 week old fetus that happened to be born alive before the doctor arrived at the clinic to assist the young girl in the procedure. The baby, struggling to breathe, was stuffed in a plastic bag, it was sealed, and the baby was thrown in the trash, where she died. Looking for the article, I ran across one advertising the services of a Florida doctor who will abort a baby up to 24 weeks for the bargain price of $2500-to rid you of that pesky fetus you accidentally created. He even offers deluxe concierge services, like a day at the spa.

I have been thinking about this, intermittently, ever since. I remember my ignorant youth and my uninformed passion about protecting the right of a person to abort whenever...all my NOW marches and feminist leanings, in which I naively defended, unlimited reproductive rights (not to bash either of these things, but to bash my very real ignorance+very real zealous passion for issues I didn't fully grasp). I didn't have the experience of carrying a life, of feeling a baby moving inside my body, of dreaming of the day I would meet the miraculous and sentient being that was my child. I hadn't spent day after endless day praying next to her incubator that she would survive, much less thrive, valuing such a little life above anything I've ever valued in all my days on this earth. I had no emotional connection to the issue whatever, and didn't know what an 8 week fetus versus a 23 week fetus even meant, really. I took my contraceptive pill every day, thankful I had the right to exercise that control over my life, and that was as close as I came to the abortion issue (for what it's worth, I am still thankful I have the right to exercise that judgement).

So, from there, I have come full circle. As I type, I am feeling my 20 week fetus moving. It is riveting, and it is sublime. Since the youngest preemie to ever survive was 21.5 weeks gestation, I am finding it hard not to call what happened in Florida a murder. I find myself thinking that people have some personal responsibility to terminate in the first 12 weeks if they are going to do it at all. I have read Planned Parenthood's take on why people have abortions late in the second trimester (access, expenses, lack of medical resources, etc.)...but, I struggle to justify it even then...life is sacred, isn't it?? Sometimes not?

After 20 weeks gestation each year, about 20,000 babies are aborted. Aside extenuating circumstances (medical necessity, for example), I am coming to feel like elective abortion should be illegal by that point, period. Partial birth abortions are horrifying procedures, luckily fairy rare (though about 3000 a year are still performed in this country), and represent some of the basest medicine that exists. I'm not sure what kind of person could perform an abortion on a child that is viable, especially the kind of brutal extraction required. The rest of the world goes to jail for deliberately taking the life of another conscious (or unconscious) human being, but these practitioners are protected by a woman's right to choose.

Not that I don't think we do have the right to choose. We can choose to be responsible...we can choose to use birth control. We can choose to get a morning after pill when our blastocyte is a handful of cells, with no heartbeat. Personally, I am relieved and blessed to have never had to make a decision like this, but I really struggle, a LOT lately, with this issue. I struggle because I believe we, as women, should lift eachother up. I believe we should be empowered to make good decisions. I believe we should be in control of our lives, as much as possible. But black and white thinking doesn't work when we stop and consider why some women are not empowered to make healthy decisions for themselves (poverty, lack of education, abuse, etc.)... I think, at my core, that I embody a number of feminist ideals, and I support equality and gender neutrality. But, the older I get, my clarity is muddled when I think about reproductive decisions as they relate to the concept of equality. If we push for equal rights for all, where do we draw the line between protecting a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, and a fetus' right as a human being to live? Those things, at least as far as this debate goes, appear to be mutually exclusive. And I have heard all the many arguments about when a conceptualite becomes a human being-people trying to be scientific about when human life begins in an effort to objectify the debate-but does that matter? Will people ever reach consensus on when life begins? That position appears, to me, to be very personal.

Baby B!

Baby B is a GIRL!!!!

Once again, we were convinced this was a boy and she isn't. I am thrilled on so many levels- a) sisterhood is a special bond, and hopefully Gillian and this little one will be close; b) economics; we have all the baby clothes/girl toys we will ever need!! we can keep our guest room because girls can share a room!!; c) laziness; on some level, parenting is parenting is parenting, but there are differences between raising boys and girls, and we already have practice with a girl. Now, we also have a list of pros if this would have been a boy, but needless to say, we could find something to be excited about either way.

Most importantly, she looks great-everything looks healthy. No signs of any abnormalities, everything is measuring appropriately, etc. The tech could have taken her time a little more (she was done lickety split, so no cute moments like with Gillian when we saw her yawn), but the outcome is as good as I could have hoped for. Praise God.

My feet swelled yesterday, instilling much angst in me, since I swelled the first time with Gillian at 19 weeks 6 days after we flew to Atlanta (I had my ultrasound the day before, and remember this vividly). None today, and I'm hoping it means absolutely nothing. Of course, in my paranoia I searched the web for when swelling begins, and it seems it isn't abnormal to start in the 4th month. So, ujaii beathing for me...and lots of praying. I would love to take this little girl home with me when I leave the hospital this go 'round.

Profile:


Gender:


Skeletor...er, um, I mean baby who doesn't have brown fat in her face (yet):

Another short...

I was changing Gillian's diaper today and she was holding her feet while she was laying on her back. Then from out of nowhere as she lifted her bum up in the air-she said:

"Mama, my 'gina is yawnin'!" (yes, her VAGINA is yawning).

I laughed so hard I peed my pants a little.