Six Months!

Harper is six months old! When I think about how much she has learned in order to change from a baby burrito in a blanket into a tiny human with a personality, it seems like it must have been more than just six months. But when I think about the fact that I still don't have any ab muscles, it seems like half a year can't possibly have gone by already.

I think the first three months seemed to go by slowly, because the nights and days were pretty much all the same: feed the baby, hold the baby while she looks around for 45 minutes, baby sleeps (or you try to get her to sleep) for an hour and a half, change baby's diaper, repeat. I still have a hard time staying up past 8pm because I'm operating on a sleep deficit from the first few months. These last three months, though, Harper has been sleeping through the night and we've established a new "normal" routine, which helps eliminate some of the clock-watching. More than that, though, she learns something new every day, and it's amazing to see her find her toes for the first time, recognize you and smile when you walk into the room, or work to get a toy that's out of reach instead of thinking that it just disappeared. Watching her progress has definitely made the time go by faster.


We had her six month appointment this morning, where the doctor confirmed what everyone who meets her says: she's little. She's in the 25th percentile for both weight and height. But 25th percentile is still normal, so there's no concerns. She'll just be wearing some of her 3-6 month clothes a little longer than some other babies.

Part of the reason she's small could be that she's still eating only breastmilk (formula often makes bigger babies). However, she recently started drinking six ounces per bottle at day care, and I'm having a pretty hard time pumping enough to keep up with that demand. When the ladies at day care told me they wanted to increase her bottles to six ounces, they knew they were delivering bad news.

"So, Margo and I were talking..." the afternoon lady told me. "We ah...well, we were just thinking...um, well, we thought that maybe, since Harper will be eating solids soon...ah, we thought that it might be good if, um, if you could increase her bottles to, ah, six ounces." She avoided eye contact when actually saying the number of ounces.

I found the delivery of this news rather amusing, but my honest reaction was about as bad as she was expecting. Outwardly all I said was, "You're killing me!" and I dutifully brought in six ounces the next day. I've had to tap into the store of frozen milk to make that happen, though, so we'll see how long this lasts. My hope is that Harper will be able to go a little longer between bottles once she starts adding solid food to her daily meals next week, and maybe I'll only need to bring two bottles instead of three.

Pumping is definitely the hardest part of being a working mom. Besides being time consuming and difficult to schedule around, it means that all of my dress shirts don't fit. I put on one of my button-down shirts last week hoping to wear it to a meeting, and I couldn't even get the two sides of my shirt to touch over my boobs. A coworker of mine thinks this sounds like a dream and looks forward to the chance to have such "sexy" boobs, but let me just tell you, it gets old pretty darn quick. I actually weigh less now than I did when I got pregnant, but I still can't wear any of my old shirts. By the time I can they'll probably be out of style! Thinking about having to keep up pumping and wearing the same three T-shirts for another six months is definitely one of those times when six months seems like a very long time. Hopefully the milestones we have waiting for us in that time (crawling, babbling, walking!) will make it go by quickly--and hopefully no one will comment if I'm wearing the same shirt in every photo of me between now and then.

Gumby Knees

Yesterday Harper work up early so I was able to make it to the gym at 8am for the first time in a long time. The 8am crowd is probably the youngest and most fit of the groups I've encountered so far at the local rec center, which meant that I was more conscious of my appearance than I am when it's just me and the 70+ crowd. Of course, by the time I'm already at the gym it's too late to do anything about my appearance, so all I can do is put in my earbuds and pretend I don't realize that I look like a dork.

See, I don't shower before going to the gym, and while you may ask, "Who does?!" apparently there is a contingent of women who either do shower or are blessed with hair that looks like they've showered even when they haven't. No one is going to look at me and make that mistake. My hair is really straight, so I don't have bed head in terms of strange tufts sticking out all over the place. What I do have, however, is really straight hair combined with grease, which gives me a slicked back look that after two days camping without a shower has prompted my husband to say, "I'm pretty sure it will bead water."

When I go to the gym, I attempt to get my hair into a ponytail even though it's too short. You'd think the grease would be a plus for this, like an adhesive to help it stay back on its own, but instead it makes it extra slippery, so it falls out of my ponytail in big stringy pieces. To solve this I use about 13 bobbypins, but I can never quite catch all of it, so pieces end up hanging down over my face, drooping over my ears, or lying limply on my neck.

So here I am at the gym, with a ponytail that's about an inch long in the back and falling down in strings all over my face in the front, wearing the workout clothes I bought right after Harper was born. I wrote about these in a previous post, but let me just remind you that they include large, drapey shorts like men's basketball shorts, and old lady tank tops with sleeves that gape under my armpits. I've lost a lot of my pregnancy weight since I bought these clothes, so the shorts are even larger and the gaping holes stick out even further. In short, I look anything but fit and attractive.

Yesterday I was stretching after using the elliptical machine, contemplating which weight machines to use, when I noticed a particularly fit lady with a lovely, fluffy ponytail wearing slim black pants and a hot pink fitted Nike shirt. She was cycling through her weight routine, stopping to use a decline bench with pads to hook her feet around to do sit-ups in between each set. For some reason I'd never noticed this decline bench before, and since I'm always looking for new ways to try to tone my jiggling belly, I thought, "That's exactly what I need!"

I watched her use it several times to make sure I knew how it worked (yes, it's just a stationary bench, but as you will see, even those can be tricky), and then I sauntered over to give it a try myself. With my ponytail, black shorts and pink tank top I was like a shorter, dopey version of the fit lady. I grabbed the handle and swung my legs up to the top, but then I couldn't figure out how to fit my legs and ankles around the pads. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get my knees under the first set of pads and my ankles on top of the second. "How the hell did that lady do this?" I mumbled. "You'd have to have Gumby knees to get them to bend that way."

And as I held my feet in the air, fumbling around for a lever or something to adjust the pads, one of the trainers that wanders around the rec center tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You put your knees OVER it and your feet UNDER these." It was so darn obvious I couldn't even say anything back, so I smiled, gave him a big thumbs up, and did what he said.

My cheeks burned with embarrassment--and then I attempted to do a sit-up. First of all, you shouldn't wear large shorts and gaping tank tops and then lie upside down. There's a reason people wear tight clothes when working out. Secondly, sit ups on a decline bench are really hard. I managed to do one with one hand holding my shorts and the other holding my shirt, and then I grabbed the handle to sit and catch my breath. And that's when I realized the trainer dude had never left. Maybe he was afraid to leave me alone based on my inability to figure out how the thing worked, but suddenly he was next to me, smiling and saying, "There you go!" I smiled and gave him the thumbs up again, and then tortured myself through nine more sit-ups so that I didn't look like a complete moron.

Today my abs ache, and I'm not going to the gym until this afternoon, after I've showered. It might be awhile before I go at 8am again. But I will use that bench again. I didn't go through that initiation for nothing.

Tops with Flare!

Yes, I said "flare" and not "flair."

While the last post celebrated my return to the world of normal pants, this post laments my departure from the world of normal shirts. I rather naively thought that a month or so after having Harper I'd be able to wear at least some of my larger, looser pre-pregnancy shirts. After digging out my giant box of clothes (still packed from our move in March, because why try to fit them into my closet when I couldn't wear them anyway) and trying on a few of the said shirts, I am now resigned to the fact that it will be months before I can wear even the largest of them. Like six to nine months.

Besides the Playboy physique I'm sporting up top thanks to breastfeeding, and the King of Queens jiggling belly below, even my arms are too flabby to fit into my old t-shirts because of my nine month vacation from weight lifting. Shirts that I used to consider comfortable, lounging shirts because they had plenty of extra room now make me look like a stuffed sausage from armpit to gut.

So I still haven't unpacked my giant box of clothes. Instead, I made a trip to the old lady section of Target and purchased a stack of shirts with flared waists and flared arms. I'm not the height of fashion, but I don't look inappropriately lumpy either. And since it's still two weeks before I can start exercising again, that's the best I can do.

Pants with Zippers!

Today is the first day I have worn pants with a zipper since October. Some people love the fact that maternity clothes replace buttons and zippers with elastic waistbands, but I have been looking forward to the day I could wear regular pants again for seven months. Granted, these aren't pants I owned before I was pregnant, and they're about three sizes larger than my pre-pregnancy size, but they zip, there's no elastic panel that nearly reaches my armpits, and I didn't have to go to a special store to buy them. It's like returning home after being in a foreign country: the trip was nice, but it's great to be back in familiar territory. When I can finally fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans I'll really be home.