I don’t watch Dr. Phil anymore. There was a time when I was a new mom with one baby when I would watch me a little of the doctor and the Oprah, of a weekday afternoon. But those days are no more. I’m too busy. I feel like I’ve seen it all before and if I haven’t seen it, it’s probably not something I need to be seeing.

I just don’t watch TV during the days.

But I’m glad someone does because a friend of mine was watching Dr. Phil and he highlighted a new diet program. Yes. I know. And I was talking to this friend about being at the absolute end, END of my rope with my body and the weighing what I did when I was full term with Wanda even though there’s no baby inside, and MOM ARE YOU SURE THERE’S NOT A BABY INSIDE, yes I’m sure. I could stand to lose over fifty pounds.

It’s called the 17-Day-Diet and I hate diets and it sounds cheesy and the book looks cheesy and the doctor who designed it wears a lot of product in his hair but the concepts make sense. It’s about learning to eat less and eat the right foods by eliminating a lot of things from your diet and then adding them back in slowly in 17-day cycles.

Photo credit: xenia from morguefile.com

So for phase one I’m eating lean meats and lots of vegetables and fruits, probiotic dairy and a small amount of healthy fat. That’s it. I’ve done this for 2 days and that means 15 more to go before I decide if I want to move on to phase 2 or stop. I can commit to anything for 17 days.

I’ll let you know how it goes. So far I feel really good. I haven’t been hungry, although I’ve had some cravings. My energy is good and weight is tumbling off. It’s designed to be a fast, healthy weight loss so I’ll let you know how much I lose after the first cycle.

Today I didn’t make it to the gym or out walking and then Laylee came home barfing from school so I was stuck inside on a gorgeous sunny day. I decided to get my exercise from the DVD that came with the book.

The exercise instructor was chattering away about how great I was doing and what to move next and just how I should shake it. Noticing her perky, patronizing tone, Laylee said, “Mom? It’s weird. It sounds like she’s talking to kids.”

And it really did, which is sad because why do we talk to kids like that? Nobody really likes to be talked to in that voice, especially when they’re sweating like a ham.

Someone asked me recently if I’d gotten lost on Facebook because this blog has been a ghost town the past few months. Twitter and Facebook have changed things for me to some extent.

In some ways I think they bring me closer to the people I care about. In others I think they put a wrench in meaningful communication. I’ll see a tweet about today being the best day ever, accompanied by a picture, only to find out weeks later the blurb on Twitter was meant as a wedding announcement.

I’ll go a week without checking in on Facebook and find I don’t know what’s happening in my friends’ lives. Someone will say, “Oh, you know what’s going on, I put it on Facebook,” and I’ll think, “I’ve seen you three times in the past two weeks and you didn’t even tell me you’d changed jobs because you’d put it in a status update.” Weird.

In the past when I had an interesting little nugget to share, I’d sit down to write the one sentence and it would turn into a 400-word blog post. Now it remains an interesting little nugget, just a few characters long. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. It’s concise.

But no, I haven’t gotten lost on Facebook or Twitter. I’ve gotten lost in fiction. I’m working on a novel that I’m really excited about and I find that I pour all of my writing energy out into imaginary characters whom I love watching come to life on my computer screen.

I’ll keep you posted and I’ll keep blogging. I miss it.

For the past few months when I’ve gotten a bad case of writer’s block on the novel, I’ve just stopped writing and blogging altogether except for my posts over at Parenting.com. Then the longer I go without writing, the more I start to believe it’s because I’ve lost the ability to write at all. Like a castaway living in silence on an island with a volleyball named Wilson, I lose my words.

So my plan is to blog when the fiction world grows too thick to slog through. Whenever I’m not here, you’ll know I’m a step closer to delivering my project. Mom, I’m talking to you. You’re still reading, right?

And yes, this post will appear in my feed on Facebook.

I want to ask you to take a bold swimsuit challenge with me.

It’s summer and it’s swimsuit season and I am sick of hearing myself talk smack about my own beautiful body every time I slip on that little black swimming suit. Sick of it. I’m sick of other people complaining about their bodies. I’m sick of hearing everyone enumerate all their many flaws.

I’m raising daughters and I want them to love their bodies. I get angry at the way media portrays physical “perfection” and insinuates that anything less than a photo-shopped super babe is unacceptable.

For almost 30 years, I’ve been complaining about my body’s flaws and it needs to stop if I want my girls to have a fighting chance at loving their own bodies. I frequently look back at old pictures of myself 2, 5, 10 years ago and think how great I looked and then remember that at the time I thought I was a tub of lard.

Yesterday Laylee was in a bathing suit and she said, “I like my body. I like being skinny.”

I looked her in the eyes and said, “I’m so glad. I love my body too. All the little wrinkles and parts show the journey I’ve been on in my life. I think my body is beautiful.” She seemed surprised because I’ve so often talked about the weight I want to lose and the improvements I want to make.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah. Really. I’m grateful for this body.”

She told me she loved my body too and I decided that if I really want her and Wanda to grow up loving who they are, then I’ve got to stop putting myself down and start trying to really feel the love for myself and be confident.

Please commit with me this summer to not flinch, cringe, make faces or put down your body verbally when wearing a swimsuit. Wear it with pride. Have fun in the water with your kids. Remember that the people who you have fun with are not the ones constantly ripping on themselves. The obviously fat people are the ones constantly tugging and covering up and talking about how fat they are. Don’t be that person. Get your confidence on.

Leave a comment if you’re ready to join me in the swimsuit revolution.

It seems that everyone who lives within a 500 mile radius of Seattle just says they’re from Seattle to save time. I sort of fall into that category. Our plays, concerts, zoos, museums and company parties are in Seattle but our home is outside the city, a ways outside. We live where things are a bit cheaper and there’s more room to breathe but we still share the same clouds and beautiful green vegetative greenness.

The past couple of weeks we’ve seen much more sunshine than is normal. Cherry trees are blossoming. Stars have even been visible at night. I’ve had to dig out my sunglasses a couple of times and Wanda’s skin sparkles like diamonds when we go outside. It’s her first exposure to sunlight since birth and we’re starting to wonder about her…

As much as I love the sunshine, I’m suspicious of it. Why is it sunny? Is the frost going to kill all the flowers? Are we about to have a major “weather event”? Does this mean it’s going to rain all summer? Perhaps Al Gore is behind this. Whatever happens, I’ll be able to see it clearly because I am the proud owner of a new pair of glasses.

I recently went in to have my eyes checked. It turns out it’s been a few years since I’ve been to the eye doctor and some things have changed, things like clothing styles and my vision.

I went to Lens Crafters, which I am convinced is a vortex not unlike the Bermuda Triangle. When we walk into that store my electronic devices stop working completely and Wanda poops through whatever she’s wearing. We tried this twice in one day and it happened both times.

The doctor asked me to look at some things. Lights blinked. I showed my peripheral vision prowess. Someone blew a puff of air in my pupils. She asked me how often I wore my current glasses. I told her that I wore them if they looked cute with my outfit or if it would benefit me to look studious at the moment. She laughed. I wasn’t kidding.

When she asked me to read the lowest line of clear letters from the eye-doctor-getting-smaller-letter-card-thing, I started to rub my eyes.

“Things are a bit blurry,” I said, “I think I have some sleep in my eyes. Just let me get this, um, sleep out of my eyes and I’ll tell you which line I can read.”

The truth was that it was 11am and I’d been awake for several hours but I could not believe that I could not see the bottom few lines. I could always see all the lines. I kept rubbing the strange goo that seemed to be blocking my vision. The doctor suggested we try out some lenses so she brought out the crazy goo-goo goggles and started in with the, “Which looks better, one or two, and one or two, and now one… or two?”

After doing this for a while I found that things suddenly began to look clear, too clear, strangely, freakishly, stop-saving-for-the-HDTV-because-now-the-whole-world’s-HD clear. My vision is not that bad but the glasses really make a difference and I’m shocked at how long I let it go like that, not realizing that I couldn’t see as well as I should be able to.

For the next few days, I walked around lifting the glasses up and dropping them back down and smiling. Dan would say, “Do they still work?” They DO! There are so many things that I’ve discovered are supposed to have crisp edges to them, road signs that are legible way sooner than I thought. Seeing = fun. Hopefully they go with every outfit because as long as I can manage to remember them, I’ll have these babies on a lot.

Something happens to me after a baby is born. If you’re a mother, it’s probably happened to you too. I suddenly feel like the world around me is breakable, myself, my family made of shatter-resistant glass that’s fully capable of shattering if given the right opportunity. Like Corelle on a tile floor, we look sturdy but at any moment, SMASH! We could all fall to pieces.

With Laylee, it was a happy fragility, sort of a dreamy bubble where I smiled, clutched her fiercely and dressed her up like a doll, loving her and yet somewhat unable to believe that I had created something so wonderful. I was having the time of my life playing mommy and wondered if at any minute someone was going to wake me up from my reverie.

As I’ve documented here and elsewhere, the dish hit the tile when Magoo was born and then I spent 2 years seeking out every last shard of broken glass and painstakingly gluing them back together. There are so many happy memories from his babyhood but in between enjoying the kids, I spent much of my time searching for shards, painfully aware of just how breakable I was.

And now I’m on round three. I feel like I’ve got things together… a bit. Most of the time. There are sublime moments like last week when Laylee and Magoo cleaned the entire main floor of our playdate-trashed house as a surprise for me while I was feeding Wanda. Then there are moments like today when I found the big kids sitting with their arms crossed on the trampoline, facing each other and screaming until their brains were gone about who had won whatever game they were playing. In the end, Laylee tried to reconcile by saying, “I’ll teach you a new game then where there are no winners and no losers. It’s called Butt-Punch.” Magoo declined the game. I rolled my eyes and walked back into the house. Dan says that in a game called Butt-Punch, he’s pretty sure everyone is a loser.

Through the highs and the lows, I find myself managing but holding on to that glued-together plate just a little too tightly. Am I depressed? Tired? Afraid of descending into the pit I discovered Postpartum II? I’m kind of afraid to ask myself. It scares me a little that I have to try so hard.

My pendulum swings precariously. One day my house is a mess and I can’t force myself to deal with it. The next I’m cleaning and scrubbing like mad. Many days I feel like a hermit, not wanting to be bothered to answer my door or phone and the next I’m sad because people have stopped calling. I’m not doing the best in my church work or my role in the PTA. I’m letting things slip.

I tell myself that this is to be expected. The baby’s only a month old, two months old, five months old. Why shouldn’t I want to spend all day holding her and squishing her, playing cards with Laylee and Magoo and reading books at home? I should like my home, my little hermitty cave. Why would I want to go anywhere else?

I’m just holding on too tightly. There is a slightly strained sensation to the sweetness of this time. I’m cherishing the time with my kids because realizing that Wanda is our last has also made me realize that Laylee and Magoo are growing up too quickly and I don’t have a freeze ray. Heck, I don’t even have a time machine. I have photos and videos and the ability to make more. Dan just bought about a terabyte of storage space for our computers because I am on a memory-capturing rampage.

How can I make the most of every minute with my kids without squeezing the life out of those moments? How can I allow myself to just be the mother I am without questioning myself into a spiral of self-doubt? If I could just live in the moment, just be here and love it, love myself as much as I love these stinking wonderful Butt-Punch-playing, breast-sucking kids. If I could be as forgiving and gentle to their mother. If. I think I’d find that I could relax my grip and the fear in my throat and there’s a good possibility that nothing would break but my stifling itch for perfection.

**As of December 2010 I no longer have ties to Nintendo besides that I enjoy and purchase their products.**
Alert, alert. I’m so excited. The Wii is soon going to be able to stream Netflix movies directly from the game console. I’ve been hoping for this development for months because although it’s fun to watch streaming movies huddled around our small computer monitor, I’d prefer the comfort of the family room couch. They announced the development this morning and I already know about it because I’m a “Nintendo Enthusiast.”

I’ve been loving and periodically blogging about the Wii since I got it for Christmas 2 years ago in one of Dan’s greatest gift-giving coups ever. We take care of it and feed it all of the games and accessories it needs and it keeps us entertained. Right before Christmas this year, Nintendo contacted me about becoming an Enthusiast. The terms are vague. There is no contract. Basically it means that I keep loving Nintendo and they periodically invite me to things and send me free stuff if they can find any games we have not already purchased. (They had a hard time doing this for Christmas.) I’m sure they’re pleased when I write about Nintendo but it’s not required. I like this arrangement.

The one event we’ve attended so far was a holiday party at a local retirement home for seniors where Laylee and I got a chance to play games “with the grandmas” and then the retirement home got a free Wii and a bazillion games. It was a great experience for both of us.

Anyway. There’s my full disclosure. Prior to Christmas of this year I wrote about Nintendo because I’ve loved them since I was in elementary school and have spent a bucket-load of money on their products. After Christmas of this year, if I write about Nintendo it’s because I love them and am spending a bucket-load of money on their products. They also sometimes send me free games and press releases now. The End.

Anyway, if you have a Wii and a Netflix membership, you can go and reserve the game disc that will allow you to stream videos by following this link. www.netflix.com/Wii Happy Streaming!

Click to Read My Product Review Policy

So things are moving along. Wanda is aging rapidly. We’ve moved her out of our room and I’ve decided it’s time to purchase some new Snazzy Jammies.

The problem is – I hate buying Snazzy Jammies. Now if you go to the Snazzy Jammie store to buy them, it’s not embarrassing because everyone in the store is there for the same reason, but who wants to spend that kind of money which only goes to pay for more of those life-sized posters right next to the kids’ play area at the mall?

No. When I’m looking for Snazzy Jammies, I usually look at Target or Kohl’s.

The problem is – Most people at Target and Kohl’s are not purchasing Snazzy Jammies. They are there looking for rain boots or a kitchen timer, maybe a roll of scotch tape. I like all of those things as much as the next person and so I usually try to camouflage my Snazzy Jammie purchase by spending way too much on sundries but, really, you cannot totally camouflage SJs. You just can’t.

A piece of Snazzy fabric may stick out from under your bag of diapers, giving your Snazzy-Jammy-Wearing ways away to curious bystanders. And at some point the checker will have to pull them out of their hiding place under the bathmat on the conveyer belt to scan them. She can either scan them discreetly or hold them up to the light, taking the hanger out with an eye-catching flourish and turning them from side to side in order to check out just how Snazzy they are. I’ve had both. I prefer discreet.

And I always feel like she’s looking at me a little too hard. Maybe she’s wondering if Snazzy Jammies should even come in the size I’m purchasing. So what if I’m wearing no makeup, have my hair in a bun and am sporting sweat pants. A woman carrying a mom-purse so big that it sets off the flashing “fasten seatbelt” light when she puts it on the passenger seat of her mini-van is still entitled to feel Snazzy once in a while. I think it’s in the constitution somewhere… or at the very least one of the amendments.

I made the mistake of blogging or tweeting a while ago that Little Baby McSquidge had slept 6 hours in a row one night. Yeah. Jinxes are real and pounding on wood after the jinx is enacted will do you no good whatsoever. It may even wake the baby.

So now she’s on a decent schedule. She sleeps for 2.5-4 hours at a stretch all night long. I go into her room and feed her, fall asleep while she’s nursing, wake up 2 or three hours later with a crick in my neck, do the other side, fall asleep, put her in bed and then head to my bed just in time for her to wake up again. It hasn’t been particularly restful. Luckily Dan’s home on paternity leave so he does pretty much everything around the house that doesn’t require mammaries.

He’s going back to work in a few weeks though and I’ve been working towards getting some sort of restful sleep schedule going. I told Dan I needed to find a way to stay awake while feeding her so I could feed her, burp her, give her a new bum, and put her away in time to get some sleep before she woke up again.

His suggestion was that I watch movies while I nurse. We have a small TV and DVD player in the nursery for that purpose but I’ve been too lazy to bring up any movies. So last night, I looked through what we had, trying to find something that could keep me awake long enough to feed but wouldn’t hold my attention so completely that I couldn’t turn it off at any point and go back to bed when she’d finished eating me.

So I started the new cinematic nursing plan last night with the short Pride and Prejudice. It was a success I think. Each feeding lasted only one hour and I was only a little bit wound up when I got back into bed. I think it took me maybe 10 minutes longer to fall asleep after each feeding, what with the drama and romance and passion and such pumping through my veins. I think this is still better than drifting in and out of unrestful sleep while sitting upright in a rocking chair.

Today at naptime I finished off the movie. Maybe tonight I’ll give Colin Firth a go. Although I still consider the BBC adaptation to be the authoritative P&P, it is a bit more mind-numbing with its slow pacing and copious discussions of gowns, propriety and fortunes.

Whatever happens, I need to find a way to feel less zombie-like. Perhaps a year or so from now, I’ll magically find the solution…

The delivery was awesome. Many of you followed on Twitter as I took my geekishness to new heights by tweeting one of my family’s most personal and dramatic moments. It was such a great way to keep our family updated all at the same time. I’m glad we did it but I’ll be deleting the tweets and moving them here so as not to leave a permanent record of Baby Wanda’s birth date up on the interwebs. (yes I know it will still be up there somewhere but I’d rather not have it on my active Twitter page.)

So, from some “mystery” date a while back, here are my birth tweets:

- 11:12 PM: No baby yet but my mom’s here to play. Get to start calling and begging the hospital for induction tomorrow. This should be fun.
- 6:20 AM: No room at the inn yet. Call back in an hour.
- 7:14 AM: AAAAHHHH!!!!! Headed to the hospital.
- 8:33 AM Just signed the forms that say “I may die here but I don’t mind.”
- 8:36 AM: Wearing the bracelet my friends made me with beads and good wishes given at my shower.
- 9:57 AM: Came in dilated to a 2 and 75% effaced. Waiting for petocin. Suddenly busy here so we’re napping till it’s our turn.
- 10:22 AM: Petocin started. It’s go time.
- 11:19 AM: Listening to old CarTalk podcasts and watching Wanda’s roundhouse kicks. No major contractions yet.
- 12:22 PM: Moved on to This American Life. Contractions picking up.
- 12:24 PM: Nurse must read same parenting books as us. I asked if I could have pudding. “Sure,” she said, “As soon as you have the baby.”
- 1:23 PM: Nurse just came in to check ma vitals. Said “Oh dear” at one point for apparently no reason. Back to CarTalk. Aye! Contraction!
- 2:25 PM: Oww. Mom. Very slow progress for the ouchiness. At least the nurses are cool.
- 2:49 PM: West Wing Season 1 is like a warm blanket to my heart. The epidural coming in 45 mins will be like a warm blanket to my uteris.
- 4:12 PM: I should have gotten that epidural two months ago.
- 4:25 PM: Water hath been broken which is normally painful but it’s okay because it feels like my lower body has taken a bath in Anbesol.
- 5:20 PM: Gonna push soon! Will update when baby is here!
- 7:04 PM: Thick dark hair, 8lbs 10oz, 20″, 15 mins pushing, so gorgeous!
- 8:27 AM: Here she is un-blue. So sweet. Slept all night (unlike the rest of us) and is eating well. Still no real name

The delivery went really smoothly. After the epidural and the water breaking, I went from a 4 to complete in less than an hour and it only took 15 minutes of pushing before she was born. She came out fist first, our little Ninja, causing us to briefly add “Norris” to our list of names in honor of his venerable Chuckness.

The doctor said, “I’ve delivered an arm,” and I said, “Oh good. Her head is out?” And he said, “No, just her arm.” But her head came out next and then the rest of her and that sweet squawky little cry and she went from being a bulge in my abdomen to a living breathing person whom I get to love, take care of and repress most cruelly for her own good for many years to come.

We did pick a name before we headed home from the hospital, put it on the birth certificate and everything. Here’s a list of the names we were mulling over on our giant spreadsheet in the hospital. You were all so good to share your ideas with me. This list includes all the names we seriously considered at some point during the pregnancy. One of them is the name we chose. So if you’re looking for baby girl names, have at it.

Anne, Jane, Ivy, Josephine (Finn), Eve, Lucy, Adele, Violet, Eden, Ruth, Gail, Estelle (Stella), Lynn, Daisy, Jean, Nina, Kathryn, Robin, Susan, Ruby, Amelia, Nora, Sally, Jill, Leah.

She is gorgeous and sweet and we love her, an amazing sleeper and a champion nurser.

There have been a few little things to work out, as there are with any baby. First, I’m working to find my emotional happy place, working with my people to get me to where I need to be mentally. It’s not the most fun but not nearly as hard as it was with Magoo when I didn’t know what was going on.

The emotional transition to third-time motherhood was complicated by the fact that 2 days after birth she developed some moderately bad jaundice and we were set up with a light box in our house that we needed to keep her strapped into whenever she wasn’t eating. A nurse has been out here every day since to take her blood and check her vitals.

It’s amazing how something seemingly small like that can send everything out of whack. Just watching her lay there on the florescent lights and not being allowed to pick her up or comfort her when she cried unless it was time for a feeding was much harder on me than I would have guessed. I guess I got the smallest taste of what it’s like for mothers whose babies end up in the NICU and they don’t get to bond with them in the typical way.

Holding and cuddling Magoo was one of the only ways I could soothe and calm my anxieties during his early life and sitting next to her light box, smoothing her hair while she screamed had just the opposite effect.

They also asked me to wake and feed her every two to three hours, take her temperature each time and record how many minutes I fed on each breast, what her diaper looked like and how many minutes I had her off the lights. They also wanted me to pump after each feeding and then give her a supplementary bottle for dessert, which meant I then had to wash and sterilize all the pump and bottle parts before going to bed before the next feeding, so sleep was rough.

My mom and Dan are here and doing everything they can to help but I want them to be at least somewhat fresh to make things seem normal for Laylee and Magoo during the day as I lay around and heal, nurse, and question my every thought, feeling and emotion to determine whether or not I’m “O.K.”

But today Wanda’s blood had improved a ton and the nurse called this afternoon to tell us we could take her off the lights and hold her as much as we wanted. This was good news, sort of tears-of-joy ecstatic news. This gives me hope for more restful nights and emotional calm in the coming days. I still plan on waking her up every three hours to feed just to make sure she’s pumped full of enough to get all the bilirubin out of her system.

So that’s where we stand. Newness, weirdness, sweetness and family. Everything feels very fragile and every minute very important. Her squirks and squeaks fascinate me and her gassy smiles melt my heart the same as if they were real smiles. I can’t get over how soft she is or how much her siblings adore her. I can’t get over how vulnerable she seems or how scared I am that I’ll never be able to keep this little person safe through adulthood. Suddenly the other two seem so fragile as well. There’s nothing like bringing a new baby into the world to make you wish your world was just a tiny, well-padded, time-proof bubble.

Rain is pouring down on our new roof but we’re safe and dry. The big kids are asleep. The baby is passed out on my mom’s chest and Dan is puttering on the computer. Ours is a good little bubble. Here’s to hoping you’re all staying dry and warm in yours.

Today I went to the pool and tried to Michael Phelps the baby out but she didn’t fall for it. 30 minutes of hardcore lap swimming left me tired and did manage to cause one contraction but I hardly think I can justify driving to the hospital and telling them I’m in labor based on just the one.

Magoo started preschool. So cute, so proud, I tell you. He clutched his little backpack straps and was all business as he went in and came out of the school. Normally when he goes to a play date or his little church class, I cannot drag any details out of him. Today he was all about the details, what they did, what they ate, what playground equipment they have, which kid misbehaved. He is BURSTING with excitement.

Or course it’s no surprise that Laylee’s SO happy to be back in school.

I’m thinking of Tweeting updates when I go into labor, whether I go on my own or get induced. It’s mostly for my family. I think the majority of people living on the interwebs do not care about every single living detail of my birth process but my family will appreciate the updates and if you care to find out, you can hit refresh on my site and watch under Twitter Updates or you can go to my twitter feed at Twitter.com/KathrynDaring. It’s very likely that the updates will be – “Headed to the hospital” and then I’ll forget to post anything from my phone and then “Had the baby two days ago. Must sleep.” But that’s something, right?

For now, I’m livin’ large with Dan and the peeps and waiting for Wanda to get squished out.