Ingredients for bliss when you are 2+1/3:

- Polka Dot Pajamas

- Dirt

Moira discovered that you can take the Polar Zookeeper Duplo animal slide apart and turn it into.. shoes!  Those jammies totally kill me too.

Yodeler’s daughter: Fionnuala looks like she should be wearing knickers and a cow bell.

Man, nap time is boring.

Nap time with Daddy.  Heartbeats + warmth = baby bliss.

While Melanie is recovering, here is a brief post from the Mr. regarding the new addition to the family.

Name: Fionnuala Irene (pronounced Fin-oo-la)

Birth Weight: 7 lbs 1 oz (exactly the same as mom and older sister)

Born on: 8-something am on the 18th of August (18/8/10 – a date I can remember! 18-8=10).  Water broke Monday evening, attempted induced labour for 18+ hours, then off to an emergency c-section after everyone threw the towel in.  All in all, a looooooooong haul.  But it is over and Fionnuala/Mommy are healthy.

Breastfeeding: going like a trucker.  Gained 92 grams yesterday after hitting rock bottom weight of just over 10% loss (so the nurses got to freak out for a bit… lol… nurses…)

Things that make me happy:

Bonding

Happy mommy + baby

You must keep a sense of humour when someone is chomping on your body.

The girls getting aquainted.

The Gremlin ready to come home from the hospital.

Things that make me mad:

Complete with tons of sugar-like crap and food colouring.

Sugar, Corn Syrup Solids, Modified Milk Ingredients, Orange Flavour (including FD&C yellow #6)

Apparently this constitutes a “vegetable” serving at the hospital.

Beef, beef, beef, instant crap, frozen crap, food colouring.

I guess that they don’t want the mothers to recover or have nutrients to create breast milk with.  I saw plently of husbands lugging cafeteria food up (they had salads, wraps, sushi, sandwiches, etc.) so if you had someone there to support you and you had money, you could get something better.

I feel especially sorry for the low income or single mothers.  Or institutionalised hospital patients that get that crap every meal, every day.

The Nurses nurtrition/diet study shows that nurses are notoriously bad eaters and have worse dietary intakes than the average person, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t fight to get their patients better food…  or that they don’t understand the importance of healthy diet to recovery?  WTF?

While it is obviously not all the nurses’ fault, the apple doesn’t land far from the tree.

They also expected me to keep a lady who was in labour for 34 hours off of all food except… ice chips.

lol.

They would have a dessicated corpse on their hands if I actually did that.  I jammed food into her maw all evening whenever a nurse left the room.  Everything from sausage to salad – how else was she supposed to survive the ordeal?

I can’t lie – I’m really bloody tired these days. I didn’t feel like this at the end of my pregnancy with Moira because she never dropped (or turned over for that matter – she was breech and therefore delivered via cesarean). At my doctor’s appointment today she told me to make an appointment for next week but she suspects I will be having the baby before then and my prenatal will turn into a postnatal baby check-up.  Baby has been head down and in the right position for quite a while now. I think she is ready and I certainly feel done right now – and a little ill.

Bath belly at 35 weeks.

My Mum is here right now – she decided to come early too – and that has been an amazing help. I feel so huge I can barely move and I have constant braxton hicks contractions. I’ve been wanting to write a post about Moira for the last week – and about her last moments as an only child – but I just haven’t had the energy.

Here is a bath belly shot from the last pregnancy for comparison. My bathroom is much nicer (and mold free) this time around.

*********************

Edited to add: My water broke while writing this post. No wonder I’m feeling rough today. Perhaps I will see you on the other side?

Another plug for guest bloggers for my series: Bringing Home Baby (#2). I have a couple lined up but not nearly as many as I would like.

I’m looking for women to share their stories of bringing home the second baby. The interloper. The one who made you realize that the baby you gave 100% of yourself to is now no longer the baby. I want to hear about how #1 reacted to #2. I also want the good, the bad and the honest. I like honest. Having that first baby is such a mind-blowing, all-consuming experience for so many women that it is hard to imagine what having two children is going to be like.

This is what I am looking for:

• A post about your life adjusting to two children (as long or short as you want)
• A photo to go with the post if you feel comfortable with that (either of your family or just the kids – whatever you want really).
• A breif bio of yourself with a link to your blog.

I want to start collecting these stories now so I can have them ready to post in late August some time.

So if you are interested, or have friends who might be interested send an e-mail to meli.mello AT gmail DOT com. I know I have a number of readers who are in the thick of baby #1 right now but are thinking of having baby #2.

I suspect this will be a multiple part series.

Things I have gotten rid of today:

• 28 cassette tapes (all mixes except The Cure: Standing on a Beach the Singles which I have had since junior high). We don’t own a cassette player – haven’t for years.
• 41 theatre playbills, programs for choral concerts I participated in (dating back to the 80s) – for most of which I have no memory.
• Piles of random, painfully dated-looking, blank postcards. Many I had taped to my binder in elementary school including one of a goth-punk girl that says “Hi Dad” that I thought was so edgy at the time. (Anyone collect postcards, they are all blank and are being recycled at the end of the week if no one wants them.)
• An “I Love My Dalmatian” bumper sticker that I was sure I would put on my car when I was an adult even though the Dalmatian I did love died 18 years ago.
• A box of letters, too many to count. Mostly they were from penpals I made while at basic training for the Air Cadets. Some of those people turned into penpals for years – lasting much longer than my 1.5 years as an Air Cadet. Others were people I met at summer camp. That box was full of stuff, I didn’t even bother to count the number of letters in there. I miss letter writing but since I haven’t heard from any of those people since before I graduated from high school (maybe even junior high for some of them) I tossed them all.
• Birthday cards & Christmas cards! Dating back to my pre-teens – why do I still have these? Two were from my orthodontist for gawds sake! Some were full of names I have long forgotten and have little memory of but are signed with the obligatory “friends forever”.

Things I had forgotten/hilarious finds: ( Read more )

I mentioned a couple of posts back that I recently discovered that Ina May Gaskin has recently published a book on breastfeeding (Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding). I plan/hope to do a review of the entire book soon (I’m almost done) but I wanted to share a bit with you:

If only one way of infant feeding is permitted to be shown on television, in the moviesm and on social networking sites on the Internet, that way of feeding, becomes something like a monopoly. If women are made to feel anxious about their breasts or ashamed of them, breastfeeding becomes a less likely option for them. Needed information about this way of feeding is effectively blocked in the public media on the false basis of “modesty.” The choice for many is narrowed to which brand of infant formula to buy and what kind of bottle to put it in. Consider, for instance, how the symbol of the bottle has become the metaphor for infant feeding in the public media of cartoons, magazines, children’s books,a nd movies; there is little federal effort to counter the impression that bottle-feeding of artifical milks is better, more reliable, and more socially acceptable than breastfeeding for a human infant.

From Chapter 16: Creating a Breastfeeding Culture

Gaskin doesn’t get preachy in her book and I’m not going to either but this passage really stood out for me because I don’t ever seeing a woman breastfeed her baby when I was growing up. I remember babysitting babies and heating up bottles – but I think I was in my mid-20′s before I saw anyone nursing a baby. I know my own Mum’s experience in the late 60′s and my sister’s experience in the late 80′s that there was NO support around them for that sort of thing. But the image of the bottle representing feeding your baby really stuck out to me – it is so rare in our North American culture that we see “feeding” represented by a mother and baby. Even a book I was reading to Moira lately had the baby being bottle fed.

When the Mister and I came to an agreement on Moira’s name it was just so simple. We both loved the name and even though we both had other names we loved the name Moira was everything we wanted. And it has turned out that way. If it was solely up to me Moira would have been called Maude – a name I still love but Mister has vetoed any more M names in the family (the last name starts with an M too). The reaction to Moira’s name has been rather surprising. People have actually gushed when I have told them her name. More than one woman has looked at her baby and said “I wish I had thought of that” – MORE THAN ONE! And so I think this is why I am having such a hard time settling on a name for Sprig. What if you go through life being introduced as Moira & So-And-So and people start gushing over your big sister’s name? Or worse – cringe at your name?

( Read more )

I can’t believe how much I missed my blog. Thanks to everyone who sent an e-mail wondering where the heck it went (it’s nice to know people actually care). Of course the biggest thanks go to the Mister who spent a good portion of the weekend (and most of yesterday) trying to save all of my work – and has documented it all in case any other super pregnant women make similar bad decisions). Now I just have to find a template that works for me (the old one isn’t working and the designer is on holiday at the moment).

Regular posting will resume this evening.

As if moving houses wasn’t enough, Melanie decided to move blog hosts as well.

Unfortunately 1&1 doesn’t have the same WordPress versioning as Dreamhost (Dreamhost is more up-to-date), so that means that Mr. Admin gets to move the database, files, and deal with a not-in-place upgrade at the same time.  Here’s a rough procedure in case anyone else is considering doing this – and trust me – don’t do it if you don’t know anything about databases (or have someone you know who is willing to help you).

There are two parts to a blog:

i) the php (and other) files that contain the website format and general directions for a web browser to display things. This includes templates and hosted content (like images) that you hosted yourself.

ii) the database that contains the users, passwords, posts, comments, options, links, meta-tags, etc.  If either of these is gibbled it will not work.  At all.  The database is by far the most important part however – it has most of what people call “content” on a blog and can be attached to a shell website and still be mostly functional.

(Files – Option A) Migration

1. Use Filezilla to get the entire contents of your old blog (ex-database) off of there for transfer to a new site.  I’ve tried many different clients, and I really suggest Filezilla for its ease of use, functionality and cross-platform conpatibility (works on Mac, Linux and M$).  Just point it to the hosting address (or IP) of your old site and connect using your username/password.  If you have already altered DNS to point to your new location you will need the root host instead of the CNAME entry.  (In 1&1, this is under “Domains”, and is something that looks like s234525345.onlinehome.us)
2. Use a zipping program to zip up the contents once you have them local and store a copy somewhere.  tar (mac and linux) or IZArc (M$) are recommended.  Most hosts don’t let you ssh into their sites, otherwise you could just ssh onto their site, tar -czf wp_backup.tgz <wordpress directory> and sftp the one tgz file over to your new host.  Ah well, c’est la vie.
3. Do not touch this backup zip file.  Ever.  Except to make a copy of it.
4. Use Filezilla to push the files up to your new site.  Some sites make a wordpress subdirectory, others make a <domain name> subdirectory which you put your wordpress files under.  It varies.

(Files – Option B) Start from scratch with files (Recommended)

If you want to upgrade your blog to a new version, your new host may or may not support moving the old files over then upgrading in situ.  In general, they will not, and you will save yourself much grief by creating a new WordPress installation and pulling over the pieces you want to keep.  You will still get to keep your posts, comments, etc.  Just custom web page design and styling etc. may get lost.  (they sometimes get lost in upgrades anyways – that’s why you shouldn’t create weirdo custom templates… cough cough…) ( Read more )

As soon as I get off this computer I’m going to write a list of all the things I need/should do before this baby is born. One of them, I just realized, is to figure out what is wrong with my blog because it hasn’t been working well lately and now it looks funny too. I have great plans for my guest blogger series: Bringing Home Baby (#2) and want everything running smoothly for when it kicks off. (Plus, we know how much time I’m going to be able to devote to the technical side of this blog after Sprig arrives – ZERO!)

Until then, please excuse the mess around here (because I think it will get worse before it gets better).