Author Archives: Cindy

Halloween wrap-up

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I could not seem to get a single photo of my two girls together, but here’s how Halloween went down.

Catie the T. Rex.
Catie the T. Rex

And Lucy the baby leopard.
Lucy the baby leopard
(If that outfit looks familiar, it’s because I’m a fan of recycling.)

Last night was cold and rainy, but we lucked out and the rain let up for about a half hour. It was just long enough for Catie to run around to almost every house on our street and get all the candy she could grab. I wore Lucy in the Baby Bjorn, and she smiled at every zombie, monster, and witch that we passed.

Lucy's first trip trick-or-treating
Pretty accurate representation. I love it when they’re too little to understand that anything is supposed to be scary or spooky.

The weather seemed to keep a lot of kids from coming out. We have so much leftover candy today that I think we’re probably all going to be diabetic before Thanksgiving. Oy.

But we had a fun night, although Catie was bouncing off the walls on a sugar high until almost 11:00 p.m., which was considerably less fun. And then Lucy decided to be wide awake, happy, and chit-chatting until almost 1 a.m. So mama has a little bit of a Halloween hangover today, even though I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in weeks. Hopefully the tiny leopard and T. Rex that live in my house will ease up on me tonight and let me recover.

taking a deep breath

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If you follow me on Twitter, you might have witnessed my tweeting of a major family crisis that happened. If you missed it, well… I’ve deleted everything about it, because I decided it was probably inappropriate to share online. I was in a state of panic, and I reached out for support. That’s what I use social media for; however, I also don’t want to cause any additional distress to my family. So that’s the last I’m going to say about it.

Except this: we are all ok. It was really bad and scary and awful for a while, but it’s starting to gradually get a little better, and I can see that things are going to turn out ok.

happy Catie on the merry-go-round

Baby jeggings!

I mean, come on. How could they not?

baby pattern baldness

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Somebody explain this to me…

Here’s Lucy’s hair when she was 3 weeks old.
Post-bath rage!
(It’s terrible that this picture makes me laugh, isn’t it? TINY FURY!!)

And this is what her hair looks like now, at almost 19 weeks.
Worst nap buddy ever. She won't stop "talking" and let me sleep!

WHERE DID HER HAIR GO?!?!!

I remember that something similar happened with Catie, so I went digging through the archives and found this.

Catie at 2-ish weeks old:
spiky hair

Same full head of dark hair that Lucy had when she was born, right? But by the time Catie was 4 months old:

Tummy time

Her blonde hair was well on its way.

So, I’m just baffled. What is with Lucy’s head? How can a baby go from a full head of hair to almost zero hair? Isn’t it supposed to go the other way?

Since we have to get out of the house for a showing, this one & I are going for a walk.

Luckily, she’s cute enough to pull off the look, but I have a feeling that when she’s older, she’s not going to like that one of her nicknames is Captain Baldy.

weekend recap

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This past weekend, my mom took Catie to Charlotte to visit with my brother and sister. Seeing as how my siblings are two of Catie’s favorite people on the planet (and my sister’s best friend was there too, who Catie also adores), we thought this sounded like something she’d enjoy. And she did, for the most part. They took her to a children’s museum, she got to meet my sister’s new kitten, and she was generally indulged in ways that would never happen if I was around (like being allowed to stay up WAY past her bedtime, eat junk food, etc.). Sounds like heaven for a four year-old, right?

But she also had a lot of meltdowns, in which she cried that she missed Mommy and Lucy. On the trip back home, she told my mom in the car that she never, ever wanted to go on a trip again.

Last night, when I was snuggling with her at bedtime, I said, “So, you had a lot of fun this weekend, didn’t you?”

She quietly said, “Not really.”

I said, “No? Why not?”

She said, “Because I missed you.” And burst into tears.

It got me thinking that even though she was around people she loves and doing fun stuff, it was probably too soon for her to be on an overnight trip away without me. I think she still feels like the ground is shifting underneath her after the separation, and it’s already hard on her to be away from Dave, so being away from me too was just too much for her. I feel bad that it didn’t even occur to me to consider that, before we planned this trip for her.

To help calm her down, I told her that no matter where she goes, she’ll always come home to me, and that I’ll always be here waiting for her.

And I said that maybe, in a few months, when Lucy is a little bit bigger and sleeping through the night, then we can all go to Charlotte together, and she wouldn’t miss me or Lucy, because we’d be there with her. She seemed to like that idea.

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On the other hand, Lucy and I had a pretty fabulous weekend. Compared to the usual craziness of having two kids in the house, having just one little baby to deal with felt like a breeze. (There’s the difference between kids #1 and #2 – with Catie, I was terrified to be left alone with the baby. Now, I’m like, “Just one baby? Pshaw!”)

Also, you know what’s great about only having a tiny baby in the house? You can watch R-rated movies and not worry about traumatizing them! I finally caught up on a few movies that have been sitting on my DVR for ages, which was great.

[Side note to George Clooney: I love you, but “The American” sucked. All scenes in which you were shirtless = WINNER. Everything else? Not so much.]

But it was a really nice weekend with my baby girl. We went to Target and Whole Foods, we went for a walk around the neighborhood, we experimented with solid food (she seems to like baby oatmeal), and we played. All in all, a very good weekend.

Lucy gets to 2nd base in her sleep.
(Check out the hand placement there. Nice one, kiddo.)

two months later

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Dave moved out two months ago.

Overall, I think I’m doing ok. I get through my days. I’m doing a pretty good job at work, apparently. My manager is pleased with what I’m doing. And I’m lucky that I love my job enough that I can sort of immerse myself in various projects and forget about everything in my “real life” for hours at a time. That helps a lot.

But Lucy still isn’t sleeping, so I’m tired a lot. And I worry about Catie. I’m so glad my mom is here, because it keeps me from feeling lonely. We watch TV together, plan meals together, that kind of thing. It’s nice.

So, you know, I feel like I’m getting by ok.

And then, suddenly, I’ll be hit with this wave of sadness so hard that it feels like I’m drowning in it. The other night it hit me because I caught myself starting to fiddle with my wedding ring, only to realize it isn’t there anymore. (I do that a lot. I never realized how often I touched it every day until I stopped wearing it.) (I took it off the day after he moved out. I know some people take a long time before they can take off their wedding rings. I… needed to not look at it anymore, if that makes sense.)

I don’t want him back. Really, I don’t. The past several months have been so awful, there’s no way I would voluntarily go back to that. I don’t like roller coasters – literal or emotional – and now that he’s gone, things feel calmer. More steady. And that’s what I need right now, both for myself and for my girls.

And I’m realizing all kinds of things about myself now that I never realized. Like the fact that I bottled up so many things for years, because I hated the idea of conflict, and I never wanted to fight. Now it’s all sort of exploding out of me. I don’t think I could go back to bottling it up again if I tried. I’m feeling sort of like the Pandora’s box of emotions, to use a really bad analogy.

But even though I don’t want him back, sometimes I still miss him. We had these inside jokes, as you do when you live with someone for over six years. We made each other laugh a lot. I miss that. I miss the connection.

And yet… Sometimes I can envision what my life is going to be like in the future. And it’s not the future I had in mind at all, but I see myself with my girls, and I see us in our own little house, doing our own thing. Going on outings and vacations together, just the three of us. And I know we’re going to be ok. I really do know that.

But man, transitions really do suck.