When Mommy’s the favorite

So here’s something that’s crushing Joe’s heart on a regular basis: many times, over the last few months, Lily has literally pushed him away while desperately clinging to me; and generally, she wants me to be the one to hold her, read to her, play with her.

He’s convinced that this most recent phase of Mommy-mania is due to him having to go on a weeklong business trip to Germany. Maybe. But since the behavior existed in a milder form before the trip, I’m not so sure.

There’s got to be a morning after (pill)

Well, in the didn’t-see-that-coming category this week, I found myself gulping down a “morning-after” pill late Tuesday – thereby making it a night-after pill, technically.

I’ll spare you all the details of precisely how Joe and I found ourselves in this situation, but because time was of the essence, the whole episode felt emotionally disconcerting and dizzying.

We’d always planned to give ourselves two years with Lily before talking about the possibility of having one more child, so we hadn’t made a decision, or even talked about it. We HAVE briefly discussed how we each intellectually fluctuate on the issue constantly. On a good day, another kid sounds fun; on a dear-God-just-kill-me-now day, keeping the one kid we already have with us sounds dicey.

You never know where the day is heading

On two occasions yesterday, things took strange turns with Lily.

But at this point, it shouldn’t be strange anymore, since by now, I’ve learned that in parenting, things turn on a dime.

Because we just turned back the clocks because of daylight savings, Lily woke up shortly after 5:30 a.m. on Monday. I’d been struggling with a cold, so I was still loopy on Nyquil, and Joe was heading into the office early, making this a pretty hardcore “oof” moment for me.

Ever hopeful, I left the lights off and brought Lily back to my bed, snuggling with her next to me, tucking her into our blankets. Joe kissed us goodbye as she was still squirming and flopping around on me, and since the daycare center doesn’t open until 7 a.m., I feared having to go down and play outside in the dark. (Lily’s obsessed with playing outside – she hands us her coat to put on her, her hat, and her mittens, brings our shoes to us, and stands at the door saying, “Side!”) But after a while, she dozed off, as I did, and we slept for more than an hour that way, snuggled together. She was a bit confused when she woke up, but it was a wonderful stolen nap together.