cranky pixels

Once again, I’m trying to make my diet less like the bottom of a caramel-corn box and more like something made by Morningstar. The problem is sugar. As in, I love it with a deep, abiding passion. It gives me nothing but misery, but I keep coming back. Come on, sugar. Love me the right way.

Anyway, I’m cutting waaaaaay back on my sugar consumption, which is a thing I do from time to time amid oaths of enduring health and vows to do things like exercise regularly (ha) and drink less coffee (HA). I’m not cutting sugar entirely out of my diet; I learned my lesson about that when I tried to Atkins before my wedding and went temporarily bipolar. No, I’m just going for an overall aura of better health. I’m trying to make more from-scratch meals which do not in any way involve fried potato products. If I crave a treat, I’ll make that from scratch too. That way, it takes a little longer (no instant gratification) and I can control how much sugar I put in.

Tonight I made some chocolate chip cookies using Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips, which are less sweet than semisweet morsels, and I cut out about a third of the sugar. I also only used half a bag of chips, so the chip-to-cookie ratio is somewhat less choc-tastic. Still yummy, though.

Slightly Less Unhealthy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

• 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2 cups unbleached white flour
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
• 1/2 bag bittersweet chocolate chips

1. Cream butter and sugars in mixing bowl. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix thoroughly.
2. Mix flour, baking soda and salt together and add the dry ingredients into the wet mixture untilcompletely mixed.
3. Fold in chocolate chips.
4. Spoon on to an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 11 to 14 minutes.

Now, I know what you’re saying. I missed so many prime health-food opportunities with this recipe. Where is the flax? The wheat germ? Where is the whole-wheat flour? Baby steps, I’m telling you.

Although I think Not So will call in reinforcements should I begin baking with carob chips…

technorati tags:healthy chocolate chip cookie recipe, less unhealthy chocolate chip cookie recipe

By all rights, I should be asleep. The baby is asleep. He curled up at a perfectly reasonable and non-insomniac 9:30pm and is now snoozing peacefully at my side. He’s very cute, my kid. I like him immensely.

The insomnia thing, though, I could do without. I am tired. I am in bed. The cats have been fed, the dishes done, the important e-mails returned and the appropriate files uploaded. Yet do I sleep? I do not. I HAVE THINGS TO DO, PEOPLE. THINGS. THERE WILL BE TIME TO SLEEP WHEN I AM DEAD.

Maybe I’ll go downstairs and have a Calm pill.

In other news, I think I have PMS.

You’d think that after a beastly pregnancy, a crushing case of PPD and a schedule so full I always burst out laughing when I try to describe it, I’d have given up on the idea of gestating again. I mean, we won the Baby Lottery with Happy Fun Baby – I found out I was pregnant right about the time we got the results of Not So’s sperm tests, which said, basically, that there was a chance in hell that we could conceive without medical intervention, but only just. And let’s take a moment and think about my schedule, which currently involves two businesses, school, full-time mothering and a vast and endless supply of dirty dishes, all of which I am staying on top of by sheer force of I don’t know what. Not So and I sat down the other day and discussed the pros and cons of having another kid, and what it came down to is that we wouldn’t be able to maintain the same quality of life if we were to add to our family. Right now, we have the best of both worlds: an amazing kid who we adore, and career opportunities we used to only dream of. It’s a delicate balance, and another baby would send it toppling.

Does that stop me from wanting one so badly I could cry? It does not.

I always wanted a big family, and though the definition of big has changed since I was younger (I no longer want enough children to start my own circus troupe, although if Happy Fun Baby decides to be a contortionist I am so all over that) my idea of family still involves children, plural. More than one, fewer than three. Kids. Of course, I also thought I’d be a schoolteacher and have really great hair, so we’ve obviously got a bit of a reality disconnect here. Still. I find myself oddly reticent to get rid of Happy Fun Baby’s more memorable bits of baby gear, and every time I see a newborn I feel my ovaries twanging in a decidedly un-pc way.

Having an only child has its benefits, though. Besides the obvious perk of not having to go through the whole pregnancy thing again, our little family is uniquely suited to the type of lifestyle we lead. We love our little two-bedroom condo; a bigger family would need a bigger house, and more stuff to put in it. We don’t own a car and don’t want to. How would I wrangle a baby and a toddler on public transportation? People do it, but it looks very hard and I do not like things that are hard. We like the fact that we can strap the baby into the Ergo and go out into the world with only minimal additional baby-related gear. I’m terrible about keeping a schedule, and Happy Fun Baby is accommodating enough to let me wing it most days. I can’t imagine how I’d get a day’s work in with an infant and a toddler. And I like being able to be completely there for my kid. I don’t necessarily want to divide my attention, even if Happy Fun Baby would be getting a different sort of family experience from his theoretical sibling.

Only children have gotten a bad rap; most people think of them as spoiled, difficult, selfish. I’ve known only children who fit that mold, but I’ve known people with siblings who fit it, too. One of the moms on a bulletin board hit it on the head when she said “No kid of mine will be spoiled–just because we CAN give her something doesn’t mean we always will.” Happy Fun Baby won’t be an only child so that we can lavish him with stuff. He’ll be an only child because we made a choice about our quality of life. He’ll have parents who love him, and aunts and uncles who love him, and cousins, and friends. He doesn’t need a sibling to be a whole person.

Now, if I can just sell that pitch to my ovaries…

technorati tags:only child, quality of life, siblings

The last couple of days have been scramble-tastic,* what with the logo-making and the client-troubleshooting and the endless, persistent teething with its related inconsolable screaming. One of these things is not like the other! One of these things does not belong! Part of me misses having an actual job**.

HowEVER, I am rocking the pajama-bottom and tee-shirt ensemble, and isn’t that what working at home is all about? I feel that this is what has been missing from my WAHM experience, and I may have to purchase several pairs of cute pajama bottoms simply so I can wear them while I work. Slouching around in sweats is so not the same thing.

Speaking of work (which we were, ad nauseaum) my OCD kicked into high gear this morning and I got up when Not So did, bringing my developmentally-impaired laptop upstairs with me so I could get things done while the baby slept. Which he did, adorably. My child is amazingly adorable. He is even adorable when he snores. The snoring thing = totally his daddy, too, since I am all girl and therefore incapable of something so coarse as snoring. (You bought that, right?)

My laptop pisses me off when I’m trying to get things done, seeing as it keeps denying the existence of a wireless signal in the middle of a page load, only to admit, grudgingly, that the signal is there once I turn Airport off and then on again. Rinse, repeat. STOP FUCKING WITH ME, STUPID LAPTOP! I KNOW THE SIGNAL IS THERE! I probably need a new Airport card, but now that the laptop has been relegated to Backup status it isn’t nearly so important. I mean, what, it’s too big of a deal for me to go downstairs and work on the Mac Mini? Especially, you know, if I’m rockin’ the pjs.

Given all that it isn’t surprising that I failed to get much done during my frenetic morning geek session. I still need to make some tweaks to one client’s site and send out some site estimates and finally, finally make another blog post and send out the March couldbe studios newsletter. First, though? I have to get this housework thing under control because OMG TOO MESSY CANNOT DEAL.

* Yes, I am aware I append far too many words with “-tastic” and I am seeking help.

** No, I am not suggesting that being a mother is not, in fact, a job. I am referring instead to the nine-to-five drudgery that I always complained about but had, at least, an end.

I’m almost 14 months post-partum, and I finally feel like I belong in my skin.

I was taking a bath the other night and noticed the way my belly fat jiggled. That wasn’t unusual, because, dude – the belly, it jiggles, much like a bowl full of jelly, were you to fill a bowl with jelly and then try and fit it into a pair of jeans. But instead of instantly flashing back to my pregnancy or thinking that’s what happens when you give birth, I just thought that’s my belly.

Yeah, some epiphany, right? But it really was, and here’s why: my body is mine again. It might be flabby and lumpy and unattractively coiffed, but sometime in the last couple of weeks I stopped feeling like a vehicle for the continued sustenance of my kid and started feeling like a person who is also a mom. I mean, yes, I’m still nursing, so it’s not like I can exist separately from the kid for more than a couple of hours at a time, but now that he’s snarfing down every solid he can find the nursing seems a bit more secondary…and the mom thing, oddly, seems more deliberate. My body isn’t what makes me a mom; being a mom is.

I still don’t fit into most of my pre-preg clothes, but at least now I feel like doing something to get into shape is less like auto maintenance and more like – well, exercising. That’s something, right? Especially since I don’t even own a car.

technorati tags:motherhood, body image

Why, hello, anxiety! It seems like it’s been days since I’ve heard from you. I didn’t think of you, honestly, but let’s not dwell. You’re here now, and it’s as if you’d never left.

The anxiety thing is funny, if by ‘funny’ you mean ‘annoying.’ There’s almost always a thing that sets it off, so instead of being all say, I’m having an anxiety attack but everything is actually okay I think oh god I’ve made a huge mistake and now everything is going to hell in a handbasket. And I panic, because that’s what you do when things go to hell: you panic. What? You don’t? Well, that’s nice for you.

Even when I know I’m having an anxiety attack (which is most of the time), it’s sometimes hard to evaluate just how much of the triggering event is all in my head and how much is that I have actually, you know, irrevocably screwed up my life in a fit of incompetence. Because seeing that someone I know on a social networking site and adding them to my contact list only to have them send me an e-mail saying “I’m really not into social networking and I don’t know how there’s an account in my name” is probably NOT a sure sign of the apocalypse, but how can I be sure? Especially when that someone happens to be my landlord, who surely thinks I am a shifty, inappropriately-social cyber-stalker now. Just as an example.

If you’re wondering, my warning label would say “Contents Under Pressure.” And there would be a graphic of my head exploding. I might just have to make a tee-shirt out of that.

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The cats were being absolute monsters last night. First there was the tag-playing, which goes runrunrunrunTHUMP runrunrunrunrunHISSSSSS runrunrunCRASHrunrunrun. Then there was the yowling at the bedroom door, prompted by the tag-related hallway exile. Then there was the body-slamming of said door, interspersed with more pathetic yowling and some door-scratching, for good measure. I dare you to sleep through that, especially when you’re sandwiched between an extremely cranky (but blessedly sleeping, finally) baby and a snoring spouse.

Last night’s cat drama might have something to do with today’s case of the blues. I feel very ninth-grade today, all glasses and braces and ugly bangs. Why, you ask? Well. I failed to survive the cut on the LiveJournal friends list of someone I know IRL (that’s “in real life” to those of you who have, you know, lives), and even though I know I rarely update my LiveJournal I still felt like the popularity police had revoked my cool license. Which they totally would if they had read that last sentence. (Cool license? Seriously?) Then I found out that I hadn’t been picked for a blogging gig on a new multi-author parenting blog. Which I’m sure lots of people applied for, blah blah blah, but I’m a good writer. Right?

On the other hand (the one that’s still popular – yay!) I am now a proud member of the 9rules Network. Can I explain how happy that makes me? Can I? Because it makes me really freaking happy. Joining me in this round of acceptances are people like IzzyMom and Plain Jane Mom, so obviously I am in extremely good company. Congrats to everyone who made it!

technorati tags:9rules, izzymom, plain jane mom, geek, popularity, cats

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