Project Fitness starting again

Jonathan and I were talking today about how having a kid has made us so much more productive.  There are a couple of reasons.  First, before having a kid, if I was "tired" I wouldn't do the things on my list.  Since having a kid, "tired" has taken on a whole new meaning.  If I stopped doing anything just because I was "tired", I would barely be able to get up in the morning.  I wouldn't have breakfast.  I wouldn't work.  Nothing would get done.  And the second thing that has made us more productive is simply that we have to be.  If you want to do anything outside of feeding, changing diapers, and being a human amuse-the-baby machine, you simply can't spend time thinking about doing things - you have to, in the famous words of nike, just do it.

So things are getting done.  The house is getting clean.  Projects are being completed.  Things are getting crossed off lists.  It feels good.

One huge project that I'm undertaking again is my fitness.  I had reached a point before Baby H where I was feeling really good about myself.  That all went down a Lucky Charms sliding board when I had pregnancy cravings.  And so I gained like 53 pounds.  I still have about 20 to go to get to where I was pre-baby.

I've been reading Julia Cameron's The Writing Diet (count words, not calories) which is a series of essays about creativity and food, and how linked they are.  I'm really clear that I'm not expressing my creativity in the way that I would like, and I wind up numbing it with food.  What's comforting about "comfort food"?  The essays all are thought provoking and have assignments - usually writing assignments, though there has been the occasional assignment to take yourself out to eat a really special meal to see what you really like, etc.

The one today was on taking one day at a time, like AA.  I don't know if I can commit to eating healthy for the rest of my life.  It seems so daunting.  But I can commit to it today.  Today is doable.  Tomorrow, I don't know about.

So I've gotten into this habit of stopping at McDonald's on the way home from my walks around the lake.  We all know I have this Diet Coke addiction, right?  I used to stop at 7-11 for my fix, but with a baby it adds extra steps of having to take her out of her carseat, etc.  The drive through seems way easier.  But then it's easy to get a McFlurry.  Or some other genetically modified crap that makes me miserable.  I know it's terrible for me.  But I keep doing it.

Today I was walking around the lake and started feeling really hungry.  I thought about what I would get at McDonald's; ie a small snack before dinner.  But then I remembered.  No, I've committed to being healthy today.  I passed by the ball fields where the little league game was going on, and I bought a diet coke from their snack bar, and then ate a handful of almonds in the car.  When I got home, J and I cooked dinner together while Baby H sat in her high chair.  We made a coconut tofu carrot curry, and nibbled on bits of tofu and carrots as we were cooking.

McDonald's was avoided.  Small Victory.

The paradox of modern parenthood

I've started reading All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior, a book about, well, modern parenting, and just in the first few chapters I've started thinking about things I never considered before when it comes to parenting and parenthood.  Here are a couple of tidbits I've thought about so far.

1) The Pill has given couples the ability to plan when they want to have children, yes.  But in the days before you could plan, and choose to have children (and when), there wasn't so much thought and expectations about it.  You did the business, you got pregnant, you got married if you weren't already, you had the kid, boom, done.  Now there's all this thought about it - ie when, how will it affect my career, what if we wait until we can afford it, etc - and that leads to all these expectations.  Once we make the conscious choice to have a kid, we then expect it to come with all the joy/spirituality/beauty/etc of the other choices we make in life, and there are all these expectations that pre-pill generations didn't have.  Like the kid will complete us.  And we will guide the kid on a spiritual journey.  Yada effing yada.

2) The concept of childhood as we know it is relatively recent.  Pre-WWII you had kids and they worked in fields and factories as soon as they were able to.  Now we have all this pressure to provide a supportive, nurturing environment to help them be the best that they can be.  Not like that's a bad thing.  It's a great thing.  But it leads to a certain pressure that our grandmothers and great grandmothers didn't have.  It used to be that the kid would contribute economically to the family.  Now, not only do they not do that, but they cost us in all these self-actualization classes that we do with them (I know a 10 year old who is in 2 different scouts programs, takes clarinet, plays water polo, is in youth group, is in math olympics, plays soccer, and is in band.  When he does homework, let alone sleep or play video games, or do other kid stuff, I have no idea).

3)  Fights between parents once a kid is involved take on a whole new level of urgency.  Now I'm not just upset about my husband being a lazy SOB, I'm upset that this is the example he's setting, and the way he's training Baby H.  That ups the ante a few notches, and makes things a bit more heated.

4)  Chronic sleep deprivation has the same effects as being drunk.  And we've outlawed drinking while driving.  Yet parents of babies and young children are going through life, going to work, (and driving on the freeways) with these glazed eyes and inability to concentrate, lower inhibitions and higher levels of anxiety like drunk people.

5)  With smartphones allowing us to always be able to work, we never switch fully into family mode and turn off work, and we wind up never actually pleasing anyone or getting anything done the way we'd like.  I'm typing this as Hannah crawls around and chews on my toes.  Am I paying attention to her in the way I'd like?  Am I writing as creatively as I'd like.  No.  But I'm writing something, and Hannah gets a little bit of me (after having me all day, I should say), and so we make compromises.

And with that, it's getting time to start the bedtime routine.

Adventures in Sleep Rewiring and Babysitters

On Monday night I had a Whole Night Alone to myself.  In a hotel, at that.  I had an early meeting in Ventura, and it would have been silly to have left at 5am to beat traffic to get there in time.  So after choir rehearsal on Monday night, I headed west to Woodland Hills, and thus cut my drive time by something like 75% (because there was no traffic).

So here's how I expected it to go:
11pm - arrive at hotel and check in
11:15pm - fall asleep
8:15pm - wake up
9am - leave for meeting

Here's how it went
11pm - arrive at hotel and check in
11:15pm - try to go to sleep
11:30 - watch an episode of Downton Abbey on my laptop
12:30 - go to sleep
2am - wake up
4am - wake up
6:30 - wake up
6:45 - give up on getting sleep
7am - go down and get coffee
7:15 - sit in a bubblebath watching more Downton on laptop drinking coffee
9:15 - leave for meeting

This was not what I expected, and left me very frustrated.  Then I realized that I should never have expectations of resting again for at least five years.  I will be much less disappointed if I just never expect to feel rested.  I suppose I am just wired to wake up all the time now.

That said, a friend did recommend using sleeping pills when I get a night off, and I shall be taking my Ativan with me on my next work trip, that's for sure.  And that trip will probably be in March.  Not like I'm counting down already or anything...

In other Baby News, we left Hannah with a sitter for the first time yesterday.  We found her through an ad she put up in the post office, but she had also sent me a note on care.com, so it was meant to be.  She's just a little younger than us, has two kids, and Hannah loves her, and lights up and smiles whenever she comes in.  Last night we went out to dinner, and were going to go bowling, but we realized after dinner that we were just too tired, so we went home and took a nap.  Not the most romantic way to enjoy a first date using a sitter, but it was needed.

Today she came over again, and we used the time to clean up around the house and yard, and just do some random stuff that we wouldn't have had time to do otherwise.  I heard Hannah fussing and fighting sleep at one point, and was going to go out and try to soothe her until I realized that this is what I was paying the sitter for.  I heard her reading stories, playing peek a boo, and singing songs until Hannah finally fell asleep, and which point the sitter left, her work done.  It was so nice to just continue putting laundry away and not have to worry about trying to get Hannah to go down for a nap.  I think we're going to use her about 10-15 hours a week now - one or two nights during the week to give us a break, and then some time on the weekends.  It's a luxury, but one that is worth every penny to our mental states.

Trying to raise a bilingual kid

One thing I've been doing a lot of recently is re-learning German.  It's been fifteen years since I've studied it properly, and I really want to raise Hannah to be bilingual from birth.  I've read lots of research on how growing up bilingual gives kids a huge head start in brain development, etc., so I've been kind of immersing myself in German for the past few weeks.  The more I do it, the more I remember - words come back to me that I had forgotten I even knew in the first place. And I looked up the phrases I use the most with her (such as "my, what a dirty diaper you have, little lady!") so that I can speak at least 10% auf Deutsch to her now, and that will only continue to grow as I learn more.  I figure that by the time she's really speaking, if I do this right, she'll be pretty much bilingual.

I am using the DuoLingo app each day, and have bought German children's books to read to her, which will also be good for me, but a few other things that are helping in the "immersion" goal are:

The Slow German podcast at SlowGerman.de - a podcast of German information and news read very slowly so that non-natives can easily follow it.  This is great!

I also found MySpass.de, which streams German comedies, full episodes, for free.  This serves multiple purposes.  First, since I'm feeling old and tired and sore, and eating lactation cookies and drinking fenugreek tea (I'd never heard the word fenugreek three months ago - now I'm obsessed with it), laughing at German comedies I can't understand is awesome.  And of course, it's helping me learn the language.  But the laughing at weird German stuff I can't understand is really the highlight right now.

In addition to the fact that growing up bilingual will help her brain development, and make it easier for her to learn new skills as she gets older, I just plain like the idea of having a second language that I can speak with Hannah, kind of like our secret language.  Not too many people in Southern California speak German, so we can have secret conversations, and I can't think of very much that's more awesome than having mother/daughter secret conversations.