Slow cooker macaroni and cheese recipe

Aug 29th, 12 / 0 Comments

I’ve been planning to make some sort of slow cooker mac & cheese for a couple of weeks now, but didn’t get around to it until today. When I mentioned this on Facebook, I got numerous requests for the recipe, assuming it turned out well. All I did for the recipe was surf a bunch of different google results for ‘slow cooker macaroni and cheese’ until I had a vague idea of the ingredients needed, bought them from memory (vaguely) and hoped I could piece something together.

I went with the basic mac & cheese, rather than doing anything interesting with it, for two reasons. One, my daughter is a picky eater and I wanted to feed this to her, and two, I wanted to make sure I had a good base recipe to start from before I started doing fun things. This is your plain, ordinary, super-awesome macaroni and cheese.

In the future, I would consider adding peas, cauliflower, or other veggies that complement cheese, as well as bacon, sausage, or chicken breast pieces. I’d also happily mix up the cheeses — either different types of cheddar, or a blend of cheddar, gouda, mozzarella, and whatever other cheeses I had lying around the house. Because I usually have them lying around the house. I’m not kidding. If I wasn’t cooking for a picky four-year-old, I’d add some pepper during the cooking process too. I’d also add some sour cream or cream cheese to see how that affected the texture and flavour.

Slow cooker Mac & Cheese

Ingredients:
Half of a 900 gram box of macaroni noodles
1 tbsp olive oil (or vegetable oil if you prefer)
1 can (370 ml) evaporated milk
1 1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp salt
About 4 cups of shredded cheese (I used extra old cheddar, and probably closer to 5 cups by the time I was done shredding)
1/2 cup of melted butter

Here’s how I prepared it:

Cook your macaroni noodles prior to putting them in the slow cooker. I may try cooking them in the slow cooker at some point, but I think the amount of liquid in the recipe would need to be increased.

Pour the cooked noodles into the slow cooker. Add about a tablespoon of oil. I used olive oil.

It’s a can of evaporated milk! I bought the stuff that was on sale.

Add the evaporated milk with one hand while attempting to take an in-focus photo with your SLR with the other. Or skip the photo-taking step. Your call.

Add the non-evaporated milk, again using the same one-handed technique for effective photo-taking.

Stir, stir, stir. Add the salt and stir some more.

Take a break from adding ingredients to the crock pot and attend to the cranky infant. If you don’t have a cranky infant to attend to, please feel free to borrow mine. As a secondary option, you can also attend to a bored four year old. I have one of those you can borrow too.

My mom worked at the Kraft cheese factory when I was a kid. My fondness for Cracker Barrel Extra Old Cheddar is a part of my history. This was my cheese of choice for this recipe, but for a creamier, less sharp final product you may want to go with a milder cheese.

Pour the shredded cheddar in to the mix and stir well.

Mmmm. Melted butter. Finally, pour in the melted butter and stir. I never claimed this was a low-fat recipe.

Let it all simmer in your slow cooker for 3-4 hours on low. Stir occasionally.

Serve topped with pepper and some shredded cheese to be extra classy — and enjoy.

Other people’s children approve of this recipe. Ignore the yellow light. Oh crap you’re looking at it now that I mentioned it.

My own child approves of this recipe. And she’s the picky one.

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Babywearing attracts attention, and other things I’ve noticed when I’m out with my kids

Aug 27th, 12 / 0 Comments

The girls and I do not respond well to staying home all day. Even Pandra, as early as 3 weeks old, was crankier and complained louder if we hadn’t left the house each day.  And so, from the first week after Pandra was born, we were getting out of the house at least once a day.

Lyra, Jenny and Pandra by the river

Out walking by the river’s edge with the family – Pandra (1 week old) is sleeping in the cuddly wrap

My preference (and Pandra’s) is to use a babywearing wrap — in our case, we’re using the Cuddly Wrap by Peapod Creations. It’s the same one I used with Lyra when she was a tiny baby, and once we’re done with it I’ll give it away and switch to using an Ergo Baby that we also used with Lyra for a long time. I’d rather have my hands free than pushing the stroller up and down the hills around my house, and Pandra would rather be cuddled up against my chest than sitting in her carseat, staring up at the sky from the stroller.

I’ve discovered that by having the baby at eye level instead of waist level, people will talk to you about the baby. A lot. And if Pandra is wearing any colour other than OMGPINK then she is automatically a boy. Maybe she has masculine features? Maybe it’s the full head of brown hair? I really can’t explain it, but even if she’s in a flowery white and purple outfit they assume she’s a boy, and the neutrals (brown, yellow, green) are all automatically boy clothes to random strangers. The only outfit so far that makes her look like a girl was bright flowery fuschia combo. I generally try the subtle ‘she’s a girl’ approach with my answers, or not bother correcting them, since I’m unlikely to have a long-term relationship with them. The questions are usually as follows:

How is he sleeping?

I’ll answer with ‘Better than her sister did’ or something along those lines, which is the absolute truth. She sleeps, she wakes up, she eats. The only comparison I have is to her sister.

How old is he?

She’s [insert age here, currently 2 months old].

Wow, he really loves to sleep on mommy like that, eh?

Pandra

Pandra doesn’t get mistaken for a boy in this – mainly due to the pink bows on her socks.

Yep. Always sleeps in the carrier.

Is he a good baby?

Much as I want to answer “no, she’s a complete demon, terrible baby, just awful” I know that sarcasm on the west coast is usually unrecognized in casual conversation, so I’ve learned not to be as sarcastic as I used to be. I’ll just smile and not at this one, since I’m uncertain as to what makes a baby ‘good.’ Are you a good adult? Am I a good mom? How do we answer these vague questions?

People will also ask Lyra if she’s a good sister, and if she likes being a big sister. Her standard response is to look at them for a moment and then just say “Yep,” with a disconnected tone that suggests she’s answered this question a hundred times. That seems to go over well, when people can hear her. Lyra’s a little soft-spoken.

The supermom effect

I’ve also discovered, by being out with the kids so much, that people don’t expect me to be out with them when Pandra is so young. That’s starting to fade now that she looks less like a newborn and more like a regular baby (and that’s one of those differences I can’t explain — you’ll know what I mean if you’ve spent enough time with a growing new baby).

When I would be out walking with Lyra, Pandra strapped to my chest, I got nonstop comments about how impressed people were that I had left the house.

Wow, you’re out already?? That’s amazing!

I would look at them and say something like “well I have a four year old, she can’t stay in all the time,” when really I just don’t understand why it’s such a shock to them. I can’t stay inside. It would make me go completely stir crazy. Apparently I’m the exception by being out and about every day with my newborn.

So if you want people to think you’re a supermom when you have a newborn, leave your house. It’s that easy.

The sleep question

The standard question people ask when they see a mom with a new baby is about sleep — are they sleeping well, are you getting sleep, how’s the baby sleeping? Everyone who’s had a baby knows that sleep is the hardest part of dealing with the new baby, and that the less sleep a parent gets the less functional they are. They mostly ask out of a sense of sympathy, I’m guessing. I developed my standard reply because I had to answer this question so often, and I’m guessing most new parents do the same, but I’ve become so tired of the question.

The comment I get in addition to the sleep question is how I look so good — so very well rested — for a mom of a newborn. At first I thought it was just a false compliment; something people were saying to make me feel better about myself. I’ve slowly realized that I was mistaken. Apparently I really do look well rested. I feel all right — somewhat tired, but nothing like how tired I was with Lyra during her wake-up-every-two-hours-every-night phase (the entire first year of her life, and again when she was 18 months old). So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m getting enough sleep, and that I actually do look good for having a two month old baby. Pandra sleeps fairly well at night for her age, and I feel lucky that she’s not like Lyra in that sense.

Hooray for compliments that aren’t false, and for getting enough sleep to look reasonably well rested!

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Don’t blink, or you’ll miss something important

Jul 31st, 12 / 0 Comments

Two nights ago I handed the baby to my husband and settled in to put Lyra to bed. Her bedtime routine hasn’t changed much since we started doing it — two stories, two songs, a couple of minutes just sitting with her or lying next to her before saying good night and leaving the room. Since we brought Pandra home it’s mostly been Adam doing bedtime stuff with Lyra, since the baby is often cranky right around that time of night. Lyra doesn’t mind, and because she spends so much time with me during the day I think she actually prefers it to some extent — she just loves storytime with her daddy.

But Pandra was in a reasonably good mood, so she got to hang out with her daddy while I read stories and sang songs for her big sister.

Somehow in the past month and a half I’ve completely missed out on how big a big sister she’s become.

I don’t know when she got so tall…

We sat down and read the books, then turned off the lights and I sang her two songs. There used to be a variety of songs to choose from, but these days every night she wants to hear only the same two songs: The Rainbow Connection and Inchworm. I sang them and then lay down to cuddle with her for a couple of minutes. When I sat up to leave, I asked her for a hug and she climbed into my lap. That’s when it hit me.

I don’t know when it happened, but the tiny waif of a child who fit snugly on my lap and could curl up into a ball in my arms has turned into a long-limbed, gangly, almost awkward little girl-creature. It is awesome and adorable and I love that she’s growing up, but in that moment of realization, that the last physical traces of my baby girl had disappeared in what felt like the blink of an eye, hit me all at once. I wrapped my arms around her and held her in my lap where she didn’t fit the same as she used to, and I had to struggle not to start crying in front of her. Tears were running down my cheeks in the dark, but I didn’t let her know it, because there was no way I could explain to her why her mommy was crying. Even now writing this down I’m crying… fortunately she’s fast asleep on the couch next to me, because I still can’t find the right words to tell her why I’m sad.

The thing is, I’m not really sad. I’m excited to see her grow, I love who she is now and who she’s becoming every day, and I’m infinitely proud of all sorts of things she does and says and learns. I wouldn’t turn back time to recover the baby version of her — or the toddler version of her — if given the opportunity. The tears aren’t tears of joy though… they’re as unexpected as the sudden realization that she has changed so much without my noticing until that moment. I miss the big leaps because I see all the tiny steps, so when I have a moment like that one, when I’m holding her and those emotions are hitting me like a tonne of bricks, it’s jarring. The only human way I could possibly react was to cry.

And otherwise, just reassure myself that I am paying attention, and I need to keep doing so. I don’t want to miss a thing.

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Boredom, decisions and the four year old

Jul 16th, 12 / 0 Comments

Lyra has been going through a phase where she isn’t interested in making her own decisions. Every morning I offer her breakfast and she refuses everything I offer, so I follow up with asking her what she wants. She replies, “I don’t know, what should I have?” The same happens at lunch. Dinner is whatever I make, so she doesn’t have the same options… but she’ll happily go without eating much for breakfast or lunch, and subsisting on snacks instead.

I’ve figured out that she’s waiting for me to offer her the ‘treat’ option for food — berries or crackers or something that we don’t have every day. But there are reasons we don’t have those things every day, and I’m not giving in to that. So she just doesn’t eat as much as she could. I’m confident that she’s still healthy, since her energy is still as high as it’s ever been.

Lyra loves her berriesThe other thing she’s been doing lately is demanding that Adam or I entertain her. She walks up to us and half-whines, “What should we dooooo?” to which we respond with a couple of suggestions (usually ones she rejects). Sometimes it’s because she’s looking for us to offer a specific thing (a computer game, Netflix, going swimming, going to the playground), and sometimes I think it’s just that she’s bored and stuck in that bored loop where you’re so bored you can’t actually motivate yourself to do anything. I admit it, I know that loop well.

For the first week or so after she started this, we tried to provide her with options, or play with her ourselves as much as we could. It didn’t seem to help the core issue, though… in fact it made her worse, and she started asking “What should I doooooo??” every few minutes. It was driving us completely mad.

So we stopped helping and told her to figure something out for herself. That led to more whining and crying, which we ignored. And eventually she walked away, went to her room, and picked up her animal toys or her cars and started playing with them. It worked!

She keeps asking the question, thought not as often, and she’s accepting it when we tell her to go do something on her own. I’m pretty sure these are skills she’s going to need for the rest of her life — I still have trouble with being bored and wanting someone else to tell me how to fix it. If she can learn to entertain herself now, she’ll be a step ahead of me.

It’s the tiny victories that make it all worthwhile.

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Birthing the baby dragon

Jul 15th, 12 / 1 Comment
Baby Pandra

This is Pandra. She looks almost exactly like her sister did at that age. It’s like we had twins four years apart.

It started with the strawberry pie.

They were fresh, local, in-season strawberries, and when I bought them I knew we couldn’t just eat the entire basket, so I decided I should make a strawberry pie. I put it off for a couple of days, but finally pulled some pastry dough out of my freezer, thawed it and rolled it out on the afternoon of Friday, June fifteenth.

But I wasn’t yet ready to eat the strawberry pie on Friday. Instead I put out an open invitation for people to join me in eating the pie on Saturday. Naturally, there were folks willing to partake in the pie, and so Saturday evening was devoted to pie eating before and after dinner, in the company of friends. It was a mighty tasty homemade strawberry pie.

We went to bed around 11:15 on Saturday night, much like any other night. I was uncomfortable, but no more so than I have been at night for months. I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for about an hour and a half.

At 1:15, I had strangely woken up on my own and heard Lyra’s door opening. She came out of her room to go to the bathroom. She was having trouble with her nightgown, so I got up to help her and put her back to bed with no real issue.

With Lyra back in her bed, I realized that my stomach was feeling kind of upset, and hoped it wasn’t because of the excess of awesome strawberry pie. When my stomach started cramping harder, I considered that it could theoretically be labour… or maybe not. I was too uncomfortable and awake to go back to bed so I went to sit on my computer for a while.

There wasn’t much going on online, it being 1:30am, and I was restless. I kept standing up and sitting back down, pacing up and down the hall, and just feeling crampy and yucky. At one point a friend sent me a message on Facebook asking what I was doing up, and I told him that it was possible — just possible, mind you — that I was in labour. Or my stomach was upset. After which I got up from the computer again and decided to run a bath and wake Adam up. It was 2 a.m.

I woke Adam to tell him that I was either in labour or had a really upset stomach. He wanted me to confirm which it was, naturally, but I wasn’t totally willing to do that yet. I told him I was going to run a bath and see if it helped me feel better, and that I was leaning towards it being labour, and he got out of bed.

The bath made me feel better, but it didn’t change anything otherwise. I kept rolling from one side to the other (beyond awkward in our tiny bathtub) and thinking that I wasn’t totally ready to be in labour yet. I finally caved and had Adam time the contractions, knowing that I had to come to terms with being in labour, since all signs pointed to it.

All the paperwork and instructions from the midwife suggested that we should call when contractions were regular, 4 minutes apart, lasting for 1 minute each, or something along those lines. When Adam started timing them, they were pretty regular (two or three minutes apart) and anywhere from 30 – 45 seconds long. So they were close but short. I was confused – I had only really been in labour for about an hour or so, and I expected a longer build-up of occasional contractions and pre-labour and all of that. I did not expect to be having contractions so close together and so early into the process, even if they were shorter than they had to be.

I wasn’t yet ready to call the midwife. It wasn’t yet 4 a.m..

The contractions were already pretty strong, and I was wandering around from room to room trying to find a way to get comfortable. Adam woke up Lyra and called a friend to let her know that we’d probably be dropping the little girl off at her house around the corner, and then we decided to call the midwife. It was around then, I guess, that I wandered back to my computer and sent a tweet: Labour? Yeah, pretty sure it is. Ow. The internet tells me that it was 3:52 a.m. when I sent it.

Lyra is concerned

Lyra rubbed my back during contractions and asked me if I was okay. It was incredibly sweet.

I remember being on the floor in the office at one point with Lyra asking me if I was going to be okay. I remember telling her that I was going to be fine, and that the baby was coming. She was rather concerned, and wanted to help somehow, so Adam told her to rub my back. It was pretty much the sweetest thing ever.

We called the midwife at that point, and she talked to me for a few minutes before saying we should wait as long as we were comfortable before going to the hospital. I was fine with that and went back to my fast, short, close-together contractions while Adam packed Lyra up in the car and took her to our friend’s place down the street. I think he was worried to leave me alone, but I have to admit that before I noticed he was gone, he had come back.

I was in contraction limbo for the next couple of hours. I moved from the office to the living room on the couch. I would look out the window from time to time and be surprised to see that it had moved from the darkness of night to pre-dawn light to dawn when I wasn’t paying attention to it. Adam asked me a few times if I was ready to go to the hospital yet, and I kept putting it off. I must have given in sometime around 6 a.m. – I remember climbing into the car and thinking that I really wasn’t looking forward to the drive, but at least it was early on a Sunday morning so there wouldn’t be any traffic…

Onward to the hospital

The drive to New Westminster’s Royal Columbian Hospital was uneventful (there were contractions; they weren’t fun), as was checking in to the hospital itself. We were put into the only labour and delivery room without a window and were told by a nurse that the midwife was on her way. We settled in for another round of contraction limbo and waited for the midwife, who didn’t arrive for a couple of hours I guess. I still had no sense of time, and with no window in the room I was beyond reality.

Stink, the octopus

This is Stink the Octopus, one of Lyra’s animals that she let me bring to the hospital so it could keep me company. Stink made me happy.

There hadn’t been much change by the time the midwife arrived. She checked me over and said that I was at 4 cm. They hooked up the monitor for the baby — since I was trying for a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After C-section) they have to monitor the baby for the entire span of labour — and put in an IV. Those are, I’m told, the primary differences between a VBAC and a vaginal birth for someone who hasn’t had a c-section. There are possible complications in a VBAC, so they prefer to be prepared with the IV, and they want to monitor the baby much more carefully than they would otherwise.

Once the monitor was hooked up, we could hear the baby’s heartbeat. Nonstop. For the entire duration of labour. We were to become very familiar with that 150 bpm sound…

The midwife also suggested I try dancing with Adam during contractions to help get through them. They were strong and required all of my focus. It seemed to help manage them, although I wouldn’t say it made them any less painful. It just made it easier to cope.

When they brought the hospital breakfast, I tried to eat some oatmeal, but everything made me queasy… or at least, contractions made me queasy. I stopped trying to eat after a few mouthfuls, knowing I would probably regret it later.

An unknown amount of time went by. At some point, the midwife checked me and said nearly nothing had changed, so she decided to rupture the membrane (aka break my water) in the hopes that it would move things forward. I swear it looked like she used chopsticks to do it. Once that was done, in theory, labour was supposed to move ahead — my cervix would dilate further, the baby would move down more into the pelvis, and we could go ahead and get the baby out of me.

In theory, anyway.

And then nothing changed for a long, long time

More time went by. The midwife kept checking on me and finding that, although I was still having regular contractions, nothing else was progressing. My cervix had basically stalled around 5 cm, I was utterly exhausted, and contractions were still every couple of minutes. And the baby’s 150 bpm heartbeat filled the room.

I guess sometime around 11 a.m. or noonish, the midwife offered an epidural so I could take a break. I had been having strong contractions nonstop every few minutes for around 11 hours. I remember holding on to Adam and saying “I just want a break”.

We didn’t have a birth plan beyond ‘have a baby at the end of the process’, so there were no preconceived ideas about going drug-free or no epidurals and so on. I was perfectly happy to take the midwife’s offer and get at least some form of rest before figuring out what to do next. So they called in the lady with the drugs and got me hooked up and lying on the bed. And I managed to get a bit of blessed sleep.

The in-labour epidural feels rather different from the one they did when I had the c-section with Lyra. I could still move my arms, and if I needed to I could move my legs a bit, although I wouldn’t have trusted myself to stand. With the c-section, I was completely without sensation from the upper chest down.

Variable intensity control

We were all pretty sure that if we played with that dial we could vary the intensity in the room, but we didn’t want to mess it up, just in case things got a little too intense.

I continued having contractions, but with the epi in I just didn’t feel them. It was a huge relief to get bits of sleep. I started to feel a bit hungry, but by this point the discussion had turned to the likelihood of my having to get a c-section if nothing progressed soon… It was starting to look like it might be the only option. The midwife decided to ask the on-duty doctor to come by and check me out (he who would be performing said c-section, should it go that way) for his opinion. She put in a call to have him stop by and see us.

We, however, were not at risk, by any stretch of the imagination. The baby’s heart rate was still going strong at 150, unchanged for hours. There was nothing specifically wrong… things just weren’t moving they way they ought to. That put us at the bottom of the list for the one doctor on the floor who had to visit a whole lot of other people — all of whom were having their own issues, more urgent than ours.

It was many, many hours of limbo before the doctor could make time to see me. By the time he did come in, I was starting to feel contractions again. I could only feel them on one side of my pelvis, which was weird. It started as pressure on the left side of my pelvis, and slowly, after a while, became more and more uncomfortable.

The doctor finally came by to see me. When he checked me out, he noted the same thing that the midwife had — I was still around 5 cm dilated, maybe 6 cm. He took a look at the scar from my previous c-section and commented on how invisible it was, then asked me who the doctor was that had done it. I couldn’t remember her name — I told him it was a woman in North Vancouver who had a really short name — and he guessed who it was. As soon as he said her name I confirmed it. He planned to tell her she did a great job the next time he saw her. I felt weirdly proud of my almost invisible c-section scar and the awesome doctor who did the work on me…

We discussed what was happening with me at that point, and where we thought things were going. The general consensus was that we were heading for a c-section, which I thought was both a disappointment and a relief. I was so very tired by that point I just wanted to have the baby out of me. It was late afternoon, and I hadn’t slept for more than a half an hour at a time since basically a day and a half earlier. And contractions are hard — they tire you out!

Time to try something else!

The doctor and midwife decided to try Oxytocin for two hours, just to see if that would get things moving the way they were supposed to. I was happy to give it a try, but also exhausted to think that it would be another two hours before we decided if I was having a c-section. I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea, had come to terms with it, and was ready to move on.

And so they plugged me into the Oxytocin, and the contractions got stronger and more frequent. I was still under the epidural, but it was wearing off and I was starting to feel the contractions stronger as time went by. They were pretty painful, actually. A friendly nurse upped my epidural, but that didn’t help. She then brought me the nitrous. I was a big fan of the nitrous. It made anything and everything bearable — I could still feel the pain of the contractions as the epidural wore off more and more, but when I breathed through that Darth Vader mask of awesomeness it just didn’t matter so much. It made dissociation even easier than I usually find it — and I can be pretty good at dissociation.

And so it went for another 1.5 hours. But the baby… she didn’t like the Oxytocin so much. There were a couple of drops in her heart rate as the stronger contractions kicked in. Nothing that required an emergency intervention, but after it happened a few times, the nurse decided that we should stop the Oxytocin drip just to be on the safe side. She turned it off after about an hour and a half of Oxy time. The midwife came back from getting dinner, and I was feeling contractions basically full-on (the epidural had worn off almost entirely for pain relief). I was leaning on the nitrous tank to get through the contractions, which were stronger than ever.

I noticed during one particularly strong contraction that, even through the laughing gas, I was feeling an overwhelming urge to push. I didn’t, but when I came out of that contraction I told the midwife exactly that. She decided to check me again and see if anything had changed… and things had! I was actually at 10 cm dilation.

They called the doctor back in, and he confirmed things. Up until that moment, I had basically given up on the VBAC and was assuming things were going to c-section territory – we all had, including the midwife and the nurses. It was evening, I was exhausted, and when the doctor said that we should go ahead and deliver this baby in the usual way, I remember that I thought I don’t know if I can do that. I really didn’t want to have to recover from a c-section again, though, and there was no way I would express any doubts aloud at that point. Some part of me was still stubborn enough to see it through — and that part of me is louder than the tired, doubting, scared part of me was.

So it’s not going to be a C-Section after all?

I don’t really know what time it was by the time we decided to try and deliver the baby. I can only say that it was evening. Adam told me later, when I asked, how long I pushed for — not long, maybe half an hour — so it must have been after 8:00 p.m. when we made the final decision.

The first thing I had to do was get the baby to move down. She wasn’t where she should have been, and I could feel that she was in the wrong spot. I learned pretty quickly how to push — it involved a lot of holding of the breath — and I felt her position change. Every time I pushed, I could feel it when I was doing it right, because she moved and I could tell it was right. It was hard — so much harder than just coping with the contractions had been up to that point, and that wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

The midwife said something about having to make a cut because I was going to tear, and told me she was putting a topical freezing cream or something on. I’m not sure I would have noticed either way. I was both more inside my own body and more disconnected from pain than I had ever felt before. There was only moment after moment of push, then breath, then push, then breath, then take a break between contractions and refocus on what I knew was coming next. I was hyper-aware of my body and there was a lot of pain there, but my brain decided to brush it aside, force it to the back of my mind and just focus on the work that I had to do. Accept the pain and move on to what’s important: evict the baby from my body.

I could hear the conversation Adam and the midwife were having about the baby’s head showing, then going back, then showing again. It was strange, but motivating – I knew when I pushed and they saw the top of her head, I was doing things right and that it would be over at some point. There was no soon — there was only infinite now. But someday now would be not about evicting a baby.

When I finally pushed enough that she came out, it was like an intense pressure had just completely disappeared from my body. I was so relieved that, when they showed me the baby, I didn’t really care that I couldn’t see if it was a girl or a boy. I didn’t care that they were taking it over to check it out and make sure all was well. I didn’t even hear if they told me if it was a boy or girl. The baby cried, loud and strong, and I knew that she was okay, but I couldn’t really think. I could only feel, and all I felt was an overwhelming sense of relief that I was done trying to force a small person (who had proven throughout the day that she did NOT want to come out) through an even smaller opening in my body. I was relieved, I was happy, I was done with pushing (the placenta was a breeze after the baby experience) and that was all that mattered.

Jenny and baby Pandra

I finally had something to show for all of my hard work!

I got back on the nitrous while the midwife stitched me up. I remember making at least one joke… something about crazy hippies… and they gave Adam the baby while I underwent repairs. Our baby girl had been born, and she was healthy and looked exactly like her older sister did on the day she was born, which was weird. And I didn’t have to recover from a c-section this time around, which made me happy now that I wasn’t actually in labour anymore. She was born at exactly 9:00 p.m. on Father’s Day, June 17th. I had been in labour for 20 hours, and had slept for approximately 1 hour before I went into labour. I don’t think I’ve been so tired ever before. Adam didn’t look like he was in much better shape. But we had a new baby, so everything was lovely.

Naming the dragon

Lyra had us calling her new sibling Baby Dragon, so it only seemed right to keep a piece of that memory. We chose Pandra as the new baby girl’s name – a name that means chief dragon and is related to Pendragon. Her middle name, Galen, means calm — because that heartbeat just stayed the same, hour after hour, no matter what we seemed to throw at her. She was born at precisely 9:00 p.m. on Father’s day: Sunday, June 17th. I don’t think Adam minded giving up his Father’s day for that.

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Maternity leave and spending time with my daughter

Jun 14th, 12 / 0 Comments

I’m in the last few weeks of pregnancy, and have now had the last two weeks off work. Maternity leave in Canada is a wonderful thing.

I spent my first week of mat leave just getting things done and relaxing around the house. I got to put in some quality time on Mass Effect 3, after having lost my save game 25 hours into the campaign during the epic failure of Adam’s computer. I haven’t yet caught up to where I was, but at least I’ve restarted with a build from ME1 & ME2 savegames to make the ME3 campaign as close to my own character as I could without replaying the first two games. I was able to do this because Lyra was still in daycare for the week – and it made me happy.

It was undeniably strange to be away from work without the feeling that I should check in to see how things are going, to make sure nothing was terribly broken before I had to go back in. By the time I have to go back a year from now, nothing I have worked on (and half the people I’ve worked with, especially interns) will even be there any more. Last time I took maternity/parental leave, by the time I went back my team had more than doubled in size and my job was completely different. It was a hard transition, but I eventually found my place and helped build a strong team to support the organization. And now I’ve left again, and who knows what things will look like when I go back, and it’s strange and unnerving if I let myself think about it too much.

Fortunately for me I guess I won’t have that much time to worry about it in a little while.

Learning to spend all of my time with a little girl

My second week of mat leave Lyra has been at home with me. It’s been challenging, since I’m not used to keeping her engaged and entertained all day, every day. Weekends are different – we have things to fill up our time, activities and visits and stuff that just needs to get done in the short time we have, and Adam is usually around being a parent. Spending all of my time with her alone is hard. I knew it would be. It’s harder being this pregnant, with my energy reserves running low and my general awkwardness making it tough to play with a nearly 4-year-old high-energy kid. I’ve been trying to think of things to keep her busy, but early in the week I definitely relied heavily on Netflix and computer games while I just lay around being tired and pregnant.

And then I felt guilty about it.

She’s reaching a stage of pushing every boundary she can find, and trying to claim more power in her relationship with us. She’s more wilful than she’s ever been before. It’s exhausting, and my patience is at a remarkably low level these days, so she can push my buttons without even trying. I don’t want to feel frustrated as often as I am, but I am. I need to find ways to keep her entertained and get her out to see other kids that don’t ultimately exhaust me too. It makes me wish I had managed to get her into preschool for September, but I had a bad few weeks of anti-social, I don’t want to deal with anything mental breakdown during the window when I could have done so, and I missed the opportunity. I should have gone ahead with it when I could, and I didn’t, and it’s entirely my own fault.

I am immensely thankful that Adam has two weeks off when baby Dragon arrives. I would probably break down completely if I was on my own with the two kids right off the bat, so I’m glad that he’ll be home to wrangle Lyra while I try to figure out the new arrival.

I’m also nervous about when he goes back to work and I really am on my own with the two of them every day. Spending every day with Lyra alone as a newborn and for the first year was easy. Juggling the needs of a newborn and 4 year old is not going to be nearly as straightforward. I’ll figure it out, but it’s really, really not going to be easy.

Lyra is truly a person now. It makes life interesting.

Outside with Lyra on a sunny day

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Baby Dragon gives me super-spy dreams / Photos of me 36 weeks pregnant

Jun 4th, 12 / 0 Comments

Lyra named this unborn child Baby Dragon, and it has stuck. She doesn’t know or care that this is the year of the Dragon; she just really likes dragons. She has also decided that we should only name it Dragon when it comes out if it’s a girl. If it’s a boy, she thinks the name should be Butterfly.

Strange, vivid dreams seem to be the standard for me lately. Apparently a lot of women experience crazy dreams when they’re pregnant. The other night I woke up right in the middle of a scary one that involved Adam driving our car far too fast on an icy road. I woke up just as the car was flipping over, heading into a bunch of trees at the side of the road. Not fun.

Last night was a bit more exciting and less disturbing. I was still very pregnant, and was a member of a secret spy organization that had been exposed. The entire group was mid-evacuation from various safe houses, and for some reason the entire city had been dropped into some kind of apocalyptic ice storm. The temperature had dropped so much that we were putting on layer upon layer of clothing with a fur-lined, hooded parka on top. I’m not quite sure how I found one that fit over my huge belly.

A group of us had climbed to the very top of a multi-storey walk-up to a balcony, where we were jumping onto a helicopter. I was very irritated that someone was holding the door open, since the cold snap had made the outside temperature -50 degrees Celsius or something ridiculous. Things were flash-freezing everywhere. They filled up the helicopter before I could get on, so I had to wait for another option to get out. A huge truck pulled up and I had to climb over the balcony and down onto the back of it, then climb down to the ground via some makeshift steps – mostly built out of crates. It felt like some sort of video game.

I climbed down and made it to a house full of other people hiding out. I think I woke up just after I’d had time to explore the house and realize that the enemy had surrounded the house and we were trying to come up with a plan for escape, or a way to hide. Everyone in the house was a woman, but I don’t know if that was going to be helpful, since I woke up before we really had to deal with it.

The dream was more exciting than it was scary, though. Not like the car accident dream from the other night, which was just terrifying.

But enough about dreams! My friend Mike took a few photos of me at 36 weeks pregnant (a week ago) and I want to share a few of them.

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Adoption fraud scam closure

Mar 30th, 12 / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago I was telling some co-workers and interns about that crazy adoption fraud FBI case and realized that I never found out what happened after the last time I spoke to the detective in 2008. Naturally, I just had to find out what came of it.

Google to the rescue! Woman sentenced to 30 months in prison for adoption fraud scam.

My favourite line of this article is “Belinda Ramirez was Jennifer Silver,” DeGabrielle said. “Ramirez was arrested at the hotel when she accepted delivery of the envelope.”

I checked – I’m still me.

To be honest, the experience wasn’t something that damaged me deeply – it was mostly surreal and strange rather than intrusive and terrifying. I learned that one shouldn’t post ones ultrasound pictures publicly on the internet lest they risk having someone steal their identity with them… I guess… but I’m not really convinced that this is a common occurrence.

At the very least, I’ve printed out the story to add to the original one about the case from back in 2008, and one day when Lyra is old enough it will be a weird and interesting tale to tell her.

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Every pregnancy is different

Mar 28th, 12 / 0 Comments

Everybody knows that every pregnancy is different. Books, websites, friends and family will repeat this bit of wisdom until you start to tune it out. It’s absolutely true, of course. At least it is in my own experience.

I’m in my sixth month of my second pregnancy now. This one has been more challenging than the first one was in a lot of ways. It’s at least in part because I’m not 32 anymore — I’m 35, part of the the ‘higher risk’ zone that brings with it a whole slew of additional tests and worries. Nothing has gone wrong — I’m lucky in a lot of ways, and I know it. But there have definitely been challenges.

The first trimester: all queasy all the time

During the first pregnancy, my first trimester was lovely. I had no morning sickness, and found that the only real side-effect was needing a whole lot more sleep. I remember coming home from work and sleeping on the couch until dinnertime, then eating and going back to sleep on the couch until bedtime a few hours later, and having no trouble at all getting to sleep. This happened nearly every night. That was it, though — no morning sickness, and none of the other first trimester issues the internet warned me about.

This time around I was not only tired out, but also found myself in a state of constant nausea. I never actually got sick, but for about three months straight I felt queasy all the time. It was beyond unpleasant. And because I have a 3 and a half year old, the concept of getting home from work and casually napping was an utterly foreign one. So for three months I was exhausted and on a constant edge of throwing up. I wasn’t unhappy about my pregnancy, but I wasn’t the picture of good cheer that I had been during the first one. I developed an uneasy relationship with food — I was hungry, but when I ate it made me queasy. I dreaded mealtimes.

Near the end of the first three months, though, the nausea vanished. I was beyond grateful, and happy to renew my formerly positive relationship with food.

The second trimester: the time of the colds

Unfortunately for me, also near the end of that first three months, I caught a cold. I’m pretty sure it came home with Lyra from daycare one day. I couldn’t take anything for the symptoms, of course, because cold medication isn’t recommended during pregnancy. I spent much of my Christmas vacation time (nearly three weeks) miserably sick. And then I developed a bladder infection and got put on antibiotics. It was not the best of times.

I recovered from the evil cold of doom, was fine for approximately 1.5 weeks, and then developed a new cold that moved in and set up camp in my sinuses. Once again I was stuck feeling awful with no medicinal recourse. I tried some natural things, but the only one that helped was lemon ginger tea, and I got tired of that pretty quickly. This one didn’t last quite as long, though — I was only sick for a week and a half.

I recovered from that cold, and was feeling fairly normal for about 2 weeks, when Lyra brought home yet another virus of some sort from daycare. I caught this one too — it didn’t just set up camp in my sinuses, it felt like it was building building itself a fortress — and was down for another week and a half. By the time I felt better, it was the beginning of March. I had basically spent the better part of three months with a cold or recovering from a cold.

The first pregnancy, by contrast, didn’t have much in the way of health impacts. It’s possible, again, that this was in part because I didn’t have a kid in daycare bringing home the germs. Or maybe my immune system was more depressed this time around than it was the first time, and I was better able to fight off the viruses. Either way, it was something different.

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a few other differences between the first and second pregnancies. Last time I had weird anti-cravings happen — I suddenly could not stand the taste of perogies for much of my last pregnancy (how does one hate potatoes and cheese together?) — I got over that. I also spent a week eating mostly bread, cheese, and canned peaches, because everything else I ate tasted like pencil shavings.

The only similar thing that happened during this pregnancy was finding that my daily latte was completely unpalatable — I hated the stuff for about four months, and desperately missed drinking it at the same time. The irony here is that I started drinking coffee during my first pregnancy to fight the daily 3pm narcolepsy. I really, really missed coffee for that four months. I can drink it again now, but I’m not having a cup any day anymore

The third trimester: in the home stretch

I don't look terribly unhappy

I feel like my belly is bigger this time than it was the first time, at the same point. I don’t have any scientific evidence to back this up — it’s more of an overall feeling of being extra-crowded than anything else. Adam agrees with me, though, so I might not be totally crazy.

I’ve had more general discomfort, like back pain and tiredness, with this pregnancy. Plus, the last round of blood tests showed that I was overall in good shape, other than being just a little bit anemic — which didn’t happen last time. I’m on iron supplements now to address that.

My varicose veins, which appeared during the first pregnancy, have taken over more of my legs. This is something I’ve mostly come to terms with, except for every so often when I’m showering and notice them. They’re ugly, but they’re part of me now. So be it.

And I’ve had to deal a little bit with additional worry from Adam. Because I’ve been sick more often, because this pregnancy has been a bit harder on my body, because I haven’t been as upbeat and obviously happy about everything, he’s been more worried about me. Ultimately I feel like everything is fine; that this is just a different pregnancy, and that there are a lot of other factors at play here. I’ve reassured him of the same.

My due date is June 23rd, which means there is less than three months left to wait and prepare. I expect it to be reasonably smooth sailing from here, but this pregnancy has driven home the realization that yes, every pregnancy really is different.

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2012 incoming – The obligatory end-of-year post

Jan 1st, 12 / 4 Comments

This isn’t really a year in review like I’ve done in the past… It’s more a ‘status of my life right now’. And I’m perfectly happy with that.

Home is my family

This was the year Lyra really developed a personality, a sense of humour, and her own set of proto-idiosyncrasies that we all end up with as adults. Sometimes, like when I put her hair up, I can see the girl she’s going to be in five or ten years, and it’s a shock to my system. Really, this whole year has felt like it’s been entirely about her. Not in the way that I’ve lost myself in motherhood – I still do my own things, have my own interests, and spend time on myself regularly – just in that she’s the highlight of my year, and of my life to date. She is the one thing that I can’t imagine living without… even more than cheese.

What? I like cheese.

Every year my relationship with Adam gets stronger. To this day, I’ve never once felt like our partnership was on weak ground, or that I had made the wrong choice deciding to spend my time with him. I have no complaints; what I do have is an ever-increasing conviction that he makes my life better in a million tiny and huge ways. And he brings me cheese.

When we decided to try and get pregnant again, we didn’t entirely expect it to happen in the first two weeks, but apparently we’re very good at conception. I know a lot of people have a harder time with that part of things, but we wouldn’t have minded more opportunities to practice before success. That said, while I’m now 15 weeks pregnant, this pregnancy has felt less real than the first one. Maybe it’s because there’s so much else to keep me busy, with Lyra being three and a half, and with the pregnancy itself giving me more of the crappy pregnancy symptoms than I ever had with Lyra. I was queasy and exhausted for the entire first trimester – not my favourite thing. But I’ve survived that, had an ultrasound that made it feel more real, and am now exploring a new relationship with food that mostly includes not feeling like eating anything while feeling ravenous. At least I can still happily eat cheese.

Work is work

I do things, I get burnt out sometimes, and then I get better… lather, rinse, repeat. It’s hard to believe I’ve been at the same place for over five years now. I couldn’t say what the future holds for me with my job, and by extension, my career. Sometimes it feels like I’m done with it and want to move on to something less frustrating, something with more tangible emotional rewards, but now obviously isn’t the time for that sort of change. A year off taking care of a growing family will bring a different perspective on everything, I’m sure. Plus, put me a year behind in potential career development, whatever that means. If I could think of a way to tie work in with cheese, I would…

What have I missed?

Let’s see, now that I’ve covered my daughter, my husband, my unborn, nameless future child, and my job, what’s left? Oh, right – me. It’s been a long year, but it really doesn’t feel to me like much has happened to me. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling of coasting for a while now. I’ve been mostly okay with that; the lack of change only gets to me occasionally, when I obsess about it for a week then get over it. I won’t be able to claim that 2012 is as even-keeled as 2011, since the whole second child thing can’t help but be a huge change of the sort that will force a lot of cascading changes behind it. Change I can handle. Change is good.

There are always things I should be working on (but don’t). I know they’re there, I know what they are, and they aren’t what you might be thinking. I’m always trying to figure out how to be better at being me, but there are some things about me that don’t serve me particularly well. I don’t ask for help when I need it. I’m not great at being a friend, even though I sometimes desperately want people to be my friend (it’s like a weird high school echo, and it makes me crazy). When I get too tired or overwhelmed or stuck in a rut, I stop communicating and getting things done. I’m happy to be lazy and do nothing, until I snap and want to destroy my surroundings with fire. FIRE! There are things I love doing, that I’m also good at, but never get around to doing because starting is just too much work.

Knowing all of these things, and I know them very well, hasn’t changed those parts of who I am. But is it laziness or wisdom that makes me want to accept that they’re part of me and it’s okay? I can’t be the judge of that (but if I was I’d say it’s probably laziness). Resolutions don’t work for me so I don’t make them, and I’m fine with that.

It’s all right though. Sometimes I do the things I’m good at, the things that make me happy, and I feel great. Sometimes I am a good friend. Sometimes I make myself go out and do something before laziness and boredom makes me light things on fire. Every once in a while I ask for help.

And sometimes I’m awesome, and I’m good with that too.

Anyhow. If you’ve read this far you must be related to me, so happy new year, and I hope 2012 is a fantastic year for you.

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