Mama Bean sings a lullaby

We are very blessed that Bean has the temperament to be put down for naps/sleep while still awake. When he was very small, up to about four weeks old, I would nurse and then rock him to sleep, or Papa Bean would rock him down for naps. But when we discovered the Swaddle, we stopped rocking. All the Baby Pundits said he would "get used to it" and "be spoiled" or "expect it all the time" which didn't sound like fun, so we started swaddling as our primary sleep cue, plus a soother, and he was quite amenable to then falling asleep by himself. Sometimes we'd even strategically angle the blanket edge over the soother to hold it in his mouth, which is sooooo contrary to all the SIDS punditry, please don't hate us, but it worked.

Not that I think swaddling and soothers are the answer to sleeping babies. I think Bean's just a chilled out relaxed little dude, and we did something consistently, and he rewarded us. Nice little Bean. We even did some of that "sleep training" stuff, and let him cry, or we'd go in just long enough to give back the soother, and then let him cry, and he would go back to sleep like the lovely, accommodating baby that he is. Nice, nice little Bean.

Even giving up the Swaddle wasn't so bad, especially when the weather started to heatify and muggify into a real Prairie Valley summer. Then the problem became his tendency to roll over onto his tummy and forget how to roll back, so he wakes up crying. (But, if he somehow stays asleep on his tummy, he will sleep for ages and it's lovely. Weird.) We put rolled up blankets and pillows and padding around him to keep him from rolling around, but it doesn't always work. And now, more often than not, he's just playing with the stuff, tossing it around (and out of) the crib so that he's twisted 180 from where we laid him down, with a pillow over his legs, a blanket under his left side, and two blankets twisted over his right hand. Again, SIDS infractions galore. But he falls asleep by himself, and wakes up happy (usually) and I just count my blessings every day (about three or four times, between naps and bedtime...)

A friend of mine had a baby about a week before I had Bean, and she is similarly well disposed to falling asleep by herself. They follow the sleep training thing, and they swaddled, and their chilled out little dudette is lovely and accommodating also. But we've noticed another similarity. Neither baby is particularly cuddly. Bean doesn't really like being held close, he doesn't lean his head or body into mine, and he definitely doesn't fall asleep while I'm holding him. Only when he's really really tired can I sometimes trick him into sort of falling into me while I'm holding him, and sometimes when I carry him up the stairs to bed, he'll start sucking on my shoulder, but that's really more about what he knows is coming next. I didn't want to "spoil" him, but I didn't realize that might mean giving up rocking him at any time, ever again, so help me God. I wonder if there's some sort of in between...

Maybe it will all change as he gets a little bigger. Certainly, they just become more and more cognizant of interpersonal dynamics, and the importance of the child-parent relationship. Maybe some of what's so hard in the Delirious Early Days is that they are so utterly dependent, and you're doing every possible thing to keep them not only alive, but comfortable and warm and cozy, and it's completely thankless. Because they have no fricking clue, right? So you're just doing and doing and giving and giving and they don't care. They only know how to neeeeeeeed. But then they hit that two to three month mark, and start giving (non-gas related) smiles. And their eyes clear up a bit, so they look like they can really see you, and recognize you, and know that you are the centre of their tiny, comfortable world. And every interpersonal milestone in the first year or two is really about you the parents. Making strange with people that aren't you, reaching for you for comfort/out of preference, learning to call you mama and dada, etc.

And somewhere in there, hopefully, having some hugs and some cuddles and sweet, quiet moments of trust and love. I'll just keep waiting.

Regardless of whether he likes it or not, after his bedtime nursing, I hold Bean in my lap and sing him a lullaby. Even when he bending over my arm to reach for the nail clippers on the table. Or climbing over my shoulder to scratch the chair fabric. Or just generally trying to get away from me. (If he's fussy and crying I put him in his crib and sing through the crying, because I'm trying to be consistent, and really, I think this exercise has become more about me than him. Motherhood is twisted; I embrace that.) I sing him a song I call Bruce's Song*

When moonlight falls across the hills
and through your windowpane
You'll close your eyes, and say your prayers
and think about your day

Did you laugh enough, and play enough?
Did you show the world your smile?
Did you catch the light, with both your hands
and hold it in your heart?
Well don't worry 'bout that now
It's time for your lullaby

*I wrote the song for my best friend, when she was pregnant. She doesn't know this, and has never heard the song, because my grand plans to record it on a disc of lullabies has not happened. Yet. But it could! One day... don't hate me, K...

Mama Bean has to get Papa Bean a really good birthday present

At our weekly breastfeeding support group, we have a little discussion period, and one time we were asked, "What have you learned about yourself since becoming a mom?" Most of the answers centred on the way a child necessitates an almost immediate loss of putting your self first. It's not that self-interest goes out the window, that the pull of selfishness isn't there. It's just that it always ends up second to the needs of the baby. Because they are so utterly helpless, and they really do depend on us for absolutely everything.

The needs are greater, in a Maslow's Hierarchy kind of way, at the beginning - those foundational basic and safety needs of food and cleanliness and a warm place to sleep. My nightmares, at that time, focused on catastrophic inabilities to fulfill those needs. "What if we were in a car crash in the middle of a storm, and I couldn't keep him warm enough, and I didn't have enough food or water, and my breastmilk dried up, and he just cried and cried from hunger until he fell into exhaustion, and we all die?" Or, after the Haiti earthquake: "What if that was me? How would I keep him protected from the sun? How would I change his dirty diapers? Where would we get water? Could I keep feeding him?" You know, basic mom fears.

As he gets older, it's assumed you've got those bottom-of-the-pyramid things covered, and increasingly we're responsible for those higher emotional and self-actualization needs. How exactly do I help my nine-month-old self-actualize anyway?

Anyway, that day, I didn't have any deep answer to the question. I'm sure I've learned things about myself since being a mama, most of them something along the lines of "I had no idea I could DO [insert parenthood related activity - change ten diapers of day, clean yellow poop off three outfits in a row, absorb liters of breastmilk and spit-up into my clothes, without batting an eye or "spitting up" myself...]" And I have learned all the right lessons about leaving my selfishness at the door, and taking extra food at dinner because I know some of it's going to go into my mooch of a son's tummy instead of mine. And I have learned all those other nice things about how I didn't know I could love someone so much, etc. I mean, babies! Gawd! They're just so gall-darned ADORABLE!

But.

Here's the immediate thought that popped into my head when I heard the question: since becoming a mom, I have learned how much my husband loves me. Which doesn't really answer the question, since it's not something I learned about my self. But it's something I've learned related to my Self and Immediate Well-being, not to mention my Heart. Or my Soul.

My husband loves me A LOT. More than I ever thought I knew, and I thought I had a pretty good idea. I have learned, more than anything else about my own personal capacity to love and care for another, little tiny human Beanlet, that I absolutely, positively married the perfect man for me. I have learned what partnership means. I have learned, from him how to love Bean more selflessly, how to live life more patiently, and how to feel everything more fully.

In those first Delirious 24 hours, when we were getting up every three hours to boil the water and pump the colostrum, and fill the feeding syringe, and he was holding Bean while I positioned myself in the chair, with the feeding pillow, and arranging the nipple shield, and then holding the syringe and slooooooowly pushing the plunger down, as we coached the tiny beast to suck more, and faster, and harder, and stay awake for crying out loud! and please please just take a little more you're doing so well, 20 mL already (20 mL! How long does it TAKE to drink 20 mL? An eternity? Oh, sure, only an eternity at 2 o'clock in the morning...) and then changing the tiny diaper, and putting all his tiny clothes back on, and we did it all as a team, sharing the load, sharing the immense weight of uncertainty and worry that we somehow Were Not Doing Enough - I tell ya, my eyes were opened. To a whole new Papa Bean. And even though we learned plenty of lessons about what love is during our previous eight years together, it was like a totally different level of the pyramid, y'know?

That's a good man, right there :)

I don't think you have to have a baby to experience this with your spouse. I think I just realize, now, that this is the undercurrent of marriage, this constant growth into stronger, more loving partnership. When you live life together, you don't just keep falling and falling into love. You walk around, side by side, dealing with shit. Dealing with life. And you share it, good bad and in between. There's a lot of in between. And in the process, you see each other in new and deeper ways, and then, then you fall deeper into love.

Listen to this song, and don't worry if it makes you cry. It totally made me cry.

Mama Bean has a garden update - with pictures!

Before I was a mother, when I met people who are poorly socialized or behave maladaptively, I would probably think a little less of them, or think I don't want to be around them more than I have to be. Or if I were forced to spend a great deal of time with them, I might save up mocking stories about them to laugh about later. Because I can be cruel and judgmental just like everyone else. Now that I am a mother, I find I just wonder, "How do I parent to avoid this in my children?" What do I have to do to raise up little people that become big people who aren't jerks, and aren't weird? (I mean, in a maladaptive way. Lord knows I'm plenty weird, but I get along in the social world alright, with only tinges of Awkward, occasionally. Occasionally often. Moving on...) And I realize that most of these people have lovely parents who didn't do anything "wrong" and that it's not About Parenting. But I still feel the monumental Responsibility of it all. And at least I'm not spending as much time remembering cruel, mocking anecdotes, right? Motherhood will make me a Better Person before we're through, as God as my witness!

I don't know why that thought just popped up. I'm having a listless, melancholy day. I am tired. I probably should be taking a nap as Bean naps, but then I can't fall asleep at night, no matter how late we go to bed (which lately has been quite late, thus the tiredness in the first place.) So. Anyway, I didn't come on here to be morose. I wanted to share the drama that is life with a garden.

Did I mention it was a rainy spring?

Last year we planted seeds and seedlings on May Long Weekend, like everyone else, and then we had a freeze on June 5th. It was a sad lesson learned. We vowed to be more cautious this year. So we didn't plant May Long. Anyway it rained that weekend. And then it rained two days out of three for the next three weeks. So when it was finally kind of dry enough to sort of plant some things, it was two days before we left for a vacation to Cowtown. So I just shoved those seeds in the ground and hoped for the best. But we only planted half the plot, and not everything we had planned made it into the ground. Anyway, another sad lesson learned, or maybe just a completion of the same lesson. Many seeds can take colder temperatures, even potatoes planted deep - certainly peas, and lettuces/spinach, carrots and beets. I should have planted those as soon as the dirt could be worked. Next year!

Here's what made it into the Big Garden:
Section 1: ruby queen beets, nantes touchon beets (nantes have a blunter tip than imperator type carrots) and red cored danvers carrots (not sure if these are imperator or not)
Section 2: improved long green cucumbers, another type of smaller pickling cucumber whose package was given to Bean to chew on and now I don't know what they were called. Gardening with kids! Yay!
Section 3: stoplight beans! royal burgundy bush beans (red-ish?) improved golden wax bush beans, and tendergreen improved bush beans.
Section 4: sugar snap peas (edible pod) and little marvel peas (shelling)
Section 5: longstanding bloomsdale spinach, early great lakes lettuce, fordhook giant (white stalk) and rhubabrd (red stalk) swiss chard, buttercrunch lettuce, and sweet basil.
Sections 6-12: some cabbage transplants, struggling butternut squash plants, grass and weeds. Oh, and a random green bean plant from last year and sprung up as a volunteer! We'll be planting a vetch-based green manure in this section to control the weeds and restore some nutrients to the soil.

top left: greens (lettuces, etc. crazy chard in the centre), bottom left: stoplight beans, centre: peas, top right: cucumbers, bottom right: great beets needing thinning, patchy carrots.

What didn't make it:
Onions, which were to be interplanted with the carrots and beets - Section 1, the root ~fiesta~
Potatoes
Zucchini or the white marrow (like white zucchini) I picked up on a whim
Tomatoes (save some plants for Russian giants a patient passed on to me, which are planted in our front flower bed)
Peppers
Thyme or sage (thought they were perennial, but nothing came back)
Kohlrabi, also picked up on a whim

Our basement growlight worked great for the early seedlets. We started soy, but didn't plant it out in time, and it died while we were on vacation. The giant pumpkin, acorn squash, and cantaloupe did survive, and are planted in our Little Garden out back. One acorn squash plant has flowered brilliantly, and I've been pretending to be a little bee, hand pollinating diligently. The giant pumpkin has so far only sent up male flowers, which is very disappointing. It's looking to cross-pollinate with another plant, but unfortunately, only one survived from the basement. So that whole project (which is really Papa Bean's baby) may be a wash this year. Anyway, here are some pictures!

top left: giant pumpkin wants to take over the world! bottom left: female squash blossom (saying that always get Fat-bottomed Girls stuck in my head) centre: pumpkin tendrils, top right: leeetle bebe acorn squashlet, bottom right: more spirally vinedrils of doom

Mama Bean and Papa Bean are winners

Papa Bean has a personal conviction that the words "one" and "won" are pronounced differently. Even though they're homonyms. (Or are they?) Arguments of homophone or homograph notwithstanding, let's agree, for the purposes of this post being funny, that these two words are pronounced the same way. Unless you're Papa Bean. Then, "won" is said as in "won ton" or even, somewhat, the named Juan. Try it in a sentence!

Spain won the 2010 World Cup.
The children won many toys at the carnival.
Mama Bean won the husband lottery. (Awwwwww...)

Feels funny doesn't it? Like your mouth is working overtime for no good reason. Because you could just say "won" like "one" like a normal person.

Pioneer Woman posted a little joke recently that goes like this:
11 was a race horse. 22 was 12. 1111 race. 22112.

Get it?

I didn't get it either.

It means this. One-one was a race horse. Two-two was one, too. One-one won one race. Two-two won one, too!

Cute, right?

Buuuuuuuuut if you're Papa Bean, the joke doesn't make sense! Because "1" and "won" cannot be punned!

:( for PB, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway, this post is really just an extension of our offline life, in which I constantly mock him for being silly about this. Every time he says "won" I pretend I can't understand him. "The children did what at the carnival?" And if he's not really paying attention, he'll actually repeat himself until he figures out I'm just giggling at him. Which just makes my day, because I get to hear him be goofy all over again! And then sometimes I'll make a joke about wanting won ton soup. But he doesn't laugh.

Just like he can't laugh at PW's cute horse joke!

Poor PB. Good thing he's so darn cute!

Mama Bean fills her soul with whole sky

As a prairie girl, my eyes are used to seeing a lot of sky. When everything around you is flat for miles and miles, you get a pretty good sense of what the word horizon means. The horizon is the straight line between the Blue and the Green and Yellow. These are the primary colours of the prairie: Sky, Grass and Grain.

I need the big sky. My eyes don't merely drink in the blue, they swallow it and digest it and fill my soul with the light (or the dark, or the hazy dusk or foggy dawn...)

I grew up an hour away from the Rocky Mountains, with a half hour of foothills in between, but there is still plenty of sky to be seen on the fields around Cowtown. Still, the land of my youth has major terrain compared to the ironing board that is the Prairie Valley. I didn't know big sky like the Big Blue Sky I know now.

When I lived somewhere low, in a true valley carved by the Mississippi, on the southeast border between Iowa and Illinois, I missed the sky. I didn't know that's what I missed - consciously, I missed my then-boyfriend (not-yet-a-)Papa Bean, my family, my friends, my house (the only one I had ever lived in to that point), my stuff, and having a car (though not necessarily the Jeep I left behind. I just really missed having a car. My automobile is like my third leg. My third super-horse-powered leg.) But subconsciously, I was weighed down by lack of sky. In retrospect, as my mind wanders the streets of my college town, the buildings seem to press down, the leaves on the great big oaks seem laden and heavy. Of course, I'm remembering the streets in the muggy days of summer, which were the heaviest days in every climatological and psychological way. And what I don't remember is much sky - I don't have a clear sense of what it looked like, it's character, it's friendliness. I just didn't see enough of it, over the hills and houses and river and trees to really get a Soul Meal out of it.

(This is all framed, naturally, by the depression I was going through at the time. That being said, it's not like I was miserable in Iowa, I had a truly excellent three years there. And it's not that Davenport was ugly or anything. There was plenty of other beauty to be seen, the Mississippi for one thing. Incredible. And if I'd never lived there, I'd maybe never have seen Chicago, and that would be a travesty. Let me tell you one day about what happens to my soul in Chicago...)

When I'd visit Cowtown in the summers, I didn't understand why the place seemed suddenly so damn sunny. Now I know it's because I was under the sky again, the true blue sky of my youth, and it was weightless and freeing and full of sun like no day could ever be in the Quad Cities. (On the Iowa plain is another story. The sun is plenty bright, and the sky plenty big out there, I know.)

But now I live in on a frying pan. A very large, very shallow, very flat flat flat pan of mud and flood and Flat. Flaaaaaaaaaat. The sky here, my friends, goes on for days.

Here is what prompts my waxing on poetically about the sky: on my drive home I travel due west on a sideway that widens out with open fields on both sides, just before I turn north onto the highway, and I can see the Whole Western Front for two or three minutes (longer if I slow down, which I am often moved to do.) Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, I drive into the sunset. For one or two glorious weeks of the Spring and Fall I am driving when the sun actually sets, and it is so fricking beautiful I don't even have words.

This Spring, it has rained almost every day of May. It is depressing and maddening for so many reasons, most related to the garden. I look at that post about what we were planning to grow, and I get angry at the sky. Yes, my beloved prairie sky. Because it won't shut it's trap and stop spitting on me! And then I want to give up gardening altogether, because before I worked the earth, I didn't give a crap about the weather beyond an interruption to my outdoor plans for the day. I didn't have anything invested in whether it rained four weeks or four days. Now, I care with my hands and my feet and my stomach. My stomach! Oh, and my wallet, which is going to have to pay for all those vegetables I planned on eating for free.

But the sky apologized the other night. Underneath this big prairie expanse, I really see the rain, instead of just hearing and feeling it. As I drove home under a melting pot of grays, I looked out at that Western Front and saw The Rain. Like an errant stroke of slate coloured paint just dredged straight down to the horizon, the perpendicular straight edge of soggy green. And because I could see so much sky, I could see this isolated downpour in the grand tableau of grey and blue and purple. I could see the fluffy cotton balls of cumulus* clouds, white bodied with silver fluff shadows, right next to the rain paint-stroke, like some cosmic force-field was keeping the storm from spreading between cloud banks. And just behind the storm, the sun was still shining. I know this because those cumulus clouds were glowing, lit from behind, and flaming with the palest gold on the edges. And I could see layers of stratus clouds stretching out in different directions to the south, where the rain had already been spent. I swallowed that rainy sky and let it settle deep behind my eyes, tired from work, tired from Bean waking up too many times at night, tired from artificial light at home at work at the computer. And my soul felt full.

Apology accepted, Sky. I love you forever.

*(yes, I had to look that up, because I missed the climate unit in high school science, because I was too busy taking IB science that ignores the weather unit. The actually useful to my daily lie weather unit)

**(yes, I need to start carrying a camera in my car for these evenings. I also get a pretty good glimpse of the Eastern sky on my way too work Monday and Friday mornings, although my sleepy fuzzy brain doesn't always fully comprehend how pretty it is.)

Mama Bean can't be bothered to be completely crunchy granola

For the first eight months of Bean's life, we didn't have to buy any wipes. We were given a bunch of refill packages at our baby showers, and we already had a box of two from before he was born. Why? Apparently wipes (alcohol-free, scent-free, every-gosh-darn-thing-free) are useful when you're hunting, so Papa Bean bought some for his single excursion of 2009, but only used a few of them.

In addition to using cloth diapers, we also wanted to make our own washcloth wipes that we could wash and reuse. When the refill packs ran out, I carefully prepared the Internet's recommended mixture of baby wash, calendula oil, and tea tree oil. They smelled really good, and washcloths wipe up poop so much better than disposable wipes. They just grip or absorb or something - we find wipes tend to smear everything around before finally getting things cleaned up. I think it's because wipes have more fluid and soapy stuff. I made the washcloth wipes damp but not soaking.

So we like using the washcloths, but I don't like making them. I fold them to fit into a normal wipes container, which will hold about 25 of them. So every 25 wipes I have to make a new box. At anywhere from 1 to 5 poops a day, that's a box every 5 or so days. It's more work than I expected. So was cloth diapering, but I can handle the diaper work. I don't want to handle the wipes work. With diapering, I can tell myself it's cheaper for us, and it's good for the environment, and that makes it worth it. Washcloth wipes are good for the environment, especially since we just add them to the diaper laundry, but it's not necessarily saving us that much money. I was using up our baby wash, and essential oils really quickly - just lucky that I happened to have both calendula and tea tree oil on hand, but it would be expensive to get new bottles when they ran out, which was going to be pretty darn quick.

Rather than get defeatist about it, I had the best intentions to brainstorm ways to make it less work. For example, I could make a big batch of the wipe solution (like, two liters at a time) and then it'd be easier to just pour out 2 cups for each new box. Another important factor (impediment?) is only having 30 appropriate washcloths on hand (You know, the cheap, thin dollar store variety. They are the perfect texture.) If I stocked up to like 50 or 75 cloths, I could have three boxes folded and ready to just moisten and be ready. But then I'm wrangling 50 or 75 tiny pieces of flimsy terry cloth in my laundry. And that just don't appeal!

Okay, so I am defeated after all. We bought a package of refills (We buy in bulk because we is cheapos!) because we're headed to Cowtown for a visit and wedding, and we're going All Disposable while traveling. And then the box of washcloths petered out today, during big smelly dumps of Epic Stank-times, and that was just so exceedingly frustrating. (I know, I know, if that's the least of my problems...) So I think we're gonna give up on the washcloth experiment for now.

The other important lesson of the day: don't loosen Bean's poopy diaper, and then go looking for a washcloth. Have the wipe In Hand and Prepared For Duty. Because otherwise, little Bean hands are going directly into giant, stank-fest Bean poop, and then - well, then it's bathtime in the middle of the day. Yippee!!

Not that I can stay frustrated for long. Did I mention the giggles? OMG, the GIGGLES. Seriously, I'm almost sad to put him to bed, because then there's no more giggles until the next morning. How do I survive?!? I know, I know, if that's the least of my problems... yeah, life's pretty sweet :)

Mama Bean has clearly been absent

Good. Grief.

(As a too-early-in-a-post-to-have-an-aside aside, this is my newest speech idiom. I say it more often than is humanly possible. And I don't even feel like breaking the habit, because it's so much better than saying for EFF's sake (without the 'eff' y'know?) all the time. I guess I have to start watching the potty mouth around the Bean, so eventually I'll be saying things like Crikey! and Drat! or something...joy.)

For the first few weeks, I was keeping this mental list of all the things keeping me from posting, but now I don't really have a great handle on it. I know there were a series of visitors - my parents, Papa Bean's youngest brother and his girlfriend, then Papa Bean's parents. During the visits I started to lag on my RSS feeds entries - I used to clear it by bedtime every day which, in hindsight, is so totally ridiculous I don't know what was wrong with me. I had upwards of 500 new items to peruse before I finally started clearing some feeds that I just know I'll never be bothered to actually read. It's not so much that I don't still really enjoy or care about all the sites I've subscribed to. I think it was more a lesson in how much excess time I was spending trying to stick to an arbitrary standard (clearing my feed) that really doesn't change anything meaningful in my life's function or purpose.

Then I had a wicked low back spasm that just completely laid me up for three or four days. I couldn't sit, I couldn't stand up, I could barely lay down comfortably. I was cuddling up to ice so hard I got freezer burn patches that are still tender and bruised (oddly enough.) I took a Monday off from work. I didn't even turn on my computer for at least two days, and then only to clean up my email. And that was another good lesson. As internettingly connected as Papa Bean and I may be, I think I'd lost some perspective on the difference between my on- and off-line lives. I will always contend that online life is every bit as real as my offline one but offline has that important distinction of being physically and temporally Immediate and Present to my physical and temporal circumstances. Online everything is removed in both space and time, that's just the facts.

I needed to remember this now, because with every day, Bean gets bigger, smarter, and more Immediate and Present in his own ways. I want to spend all his waking hours making him smile and giggle in that impossibly adorable way that I didn't even know existed before him. His waking hours are longer now, and that's just going to keep me away from the computer for now. After experiencing how much a physical problem kept me away from fulfilling his most basic needs (I could barely nurse him, let alone bend to change his diapers, or lift him from the crib) I know I can't let online issues keep me from him anymore. It's not good for either of us. I go through giggle withdrawal.

Finally, our life tippled through another wave of change, as Papa Bean started a new job. He has been on parental leave for the past six months, and would have stayed stay-at-home-daddying if a supreme job opportunity to work at the college where he's taking his pastor schooling hadn't come up - with an ASAP sort of start date. He's still an IT guy, and as an employee, his tuition will be paid. How awesome is that?! We have arranged for child care to start in August, when his parental leave would have been exhausted, and that is when he will start full-time. For now, he works part-time around my clinic schedule. Part-time, he makes essentially the same amount as he was making from parental EI, and with an excellent new benefits package (plus the tuition thing, did I mention the tuition thing?) which is good.

Since I went back to work, I haven't really been with Bean alone on a regular kind of basis. At work, I was away from them both, and when I was home, Papa Bean was generally always around. He was the one on parental leave at Home With The Baby, see. So this part-time working thing is a new world for me - it's just me and Bean when PB's at work, and just PB & Bean when I'm at work. It's like we're both part-time stay-at-home parents lol. This is now the primary factor in my decreased 'puter time. I don't know what that means for blogging right now. I definitely have missed it, and regularly have post ideas float around during my long commute or night-time nursing. With each new day sans posting, the unreasonable pressure I put on myself to Get On With It Already weighed down my motivation somehow, and I'd just go randomly wander through my RSS instead. But I'm back now. I'll try not to disappear again... (Thanks to everyone who encouraged me that I've been missed. I truly appreciate you!)