Category: Family

I definitely do things differently now that I’ve got two kids to worry about. Here are a few examples.

Breakfast – Cassie got fed oh so carefully. She ate only baby food, jars and jars of fruit, rice cereal, oatmeal. It was all carefully prepared for her tender little digestive tract. These days with Sam, I just cut up some fresh fruit and toss it on her tray. I used to feed Cassie with a spoon from her own bowl. I don’t do that with Sam. She and I share the same spoon, which is probably why she and I are sharing the same cold. Sam, or Spoonie Baloonie as I like to call her, has a nasty tendency to grab the spoon from me and fling it across the room. This is also the reason why I don’t bother feeding her baby food anymore.

Clothing – Cassie had 50 million little frilly pink outfits, all purchased by Grandmama. Sam has a handful of little shorts outfit (again, all from grandma because I’m too busy to shop for kids clothing). She wears them occasionally. Most of time, Sam runs around naked except for her diaper. I think she likes it better that way. I know it’s a lot less work for me.

Nursing – I recorded every breast-feeding I did with Cassandra up until she was about a year old. With Sam, I lasted until she was about six months old. I just didn’t have time to write down which side, how long she nursed, and what time of day she did it. I know when she’s nursing, trust me. She bites every time she latches on.

Illnesses – I used to worry every time Cassandra had a sniffle. She spent so much time with the thermometer up her butt, I think she thought it was an extra appendage that I let her wear on special occasions. I called the doctor every time her temperature rose above a hundred. I don’t do any of that with Sam. I don’t even take the temperature is she’s got a sniffly snotty running nose. I just keep her away from other kids as much as I can so we don’t spread the creeping crud. I definitely do not take her temperature that often, and I certainly don’t call the doctor every time she has a cold. If I did, I would have to pay my pediatrician rent, because we’d be living in her waiting room.

Cleaning – I sanitized everything around Cassandra. We had a special bottle steamer to clean her bottles and sippy cups. I would wash them by hand and then run them through the microwave with this stupid little steamer. Not with Sam. The bottles get run through the dishwasher. I ain’t doing anything by hand. I don’t have time. I also don’t bother sanitizing a lot of her stuff, because guess what? Her sister is going to bring home every germ known to mankind from her preschool. What can I say? It’ll toughen Sam up, if it doesn’t kill her.

Bathing – Cassie took baths in this little baby bathtub, up until she was about 13 months and she was finally too big to fit into it. Sam’s been bathing in the regular bathtub for about the past three or four months. She just got too squirmy to sit safely in the baby tub. She kept trying to crawl out of it, which wasn’t too safe since I kept the tub on the bathroom counter. She seems to like the bigger tub though and I don’t mind it either. I can sit in the bathroom and read or doodle while she splashes around water for a few minutes. Hey, it’s one way of getting a little bit of time.

Schedules – I used to worry about keeping Cass on a schedule. I had everything planned, from her naps to spending half an hour outside every day. I don’t worry so much about Sam. Frankly, it’s exhausting trying to run a schedule around a child’s needs. I’m not nearly as strict about Sam’s schedule as I was with Cassie’s, which is kind of funny because naptime is about the only time I get to work. But I’ve made myself more flexible in terms of how I do work. For instance, using the digital voice recorder to record blog entries and story ideas. Also being able to sit at the laptop and type while nursing has been a big help. I’ve found lots of little ways to squeeze in work.

There are other differences I’ve noticed, too. I guess I just don’t worry as much with Sam as I did with Cassandra. Not because I’ve gotten lazy but because I simply learned it’s much more fun to relax and enjoy what’s going on. So Sam sits in the grass in the grass while I practice karate and she ends up eating two handfuls of the lawn. It’s not going to kill her, and if I find half a bug in her mouth instead of no bug I’m not going to worry about that either. Hey, it’s protein. Just as long as she doesn’t get into any cat diarrhea, I’ll be happy.

Okay, maybe I do have something to worry about after all.

Well, last night was the big night. Samantha Ann was baptized in the Catholic Church. Michael is Catholic, I’m Buddhist, so I’m fairly ambivalent about this. It was something he wanted done, so I said okay. Of course, you know who ended up making all the arrangements to make sure this happened, don’t you?

Both sets of grandparents came down for the occasion, as did my sister Carolyn. She’s the godmother, my dad is the godfather. The eight of us (nine including Sam) took up most of a pew at the church. There was another family sitting in the row before us also having their baby baptized. Father Hannah was very nice about going over everything with all of us, although he almost baptized Sam as Matthew and Matthew as Sam. That would have been funny, but probably only to me. The other baby, Matthew, was just nine weeks old and two months premature. He was the tiniest thing. Father Hannah just sprinkled him with water from the font. Sam, however, is going on eleven months and is a huge healthy chunk of baby (she looks like a miniature King Kong, really). So she got the full dunking treatment. That meant I had to take off her diaper when we got up to the font, before handing her to Father Hannah. Then he held her up, backside toward the congregation, before putting her in the water. There was a lot of giggling over Sam’s dimply little butt cheeks, and I can safely say she is now the only member of the family to ever moon an entire church congregation. She seems quite proud of that.

In any event, she’s been baptized. We went to dinner at Johnny Carrino’s afterwards, where Sam spent over an hour stuffing pasta and bread into her gullet. I swear, I’ve never seen a baby eat as voraciously as Sam does. She’s skinnied up lately, and I think she’s deliberately trying to put the weight back on. Makes me think she’ll turn out to be Buddhist like me in spite of the baptism. She wants her round little Buddha belly back, to go with her round little Buddha nature. Ohm.