Wanderlust

Wordless Wednesday

What Happened to Two Holes in a Sheet

I love Halloween. It is my absolute favorite holiday. And this year, I get to celebrate it with my daughter. I bought her this adorable white tiger costume.

The costume selection they have for babies is pretty awesome. But once you get up to 6 or 7, they start to look like they were designed by Britney Spears. Why do little girls costumes need to be sexy? That is wrong on many levels. I don't want to teach my daughter that her self worth depends on being sexy.

I get that girls want to be pretty. That is fine and normal, in my opinion. But these costumes go far beyond pretty. Pre-teens don't need options like sexy nurse, sexy pirate, etc. What about being a doctor or a Sesame Street character?

It seems like Halloween is just an excuse for women to dress slutty and that has now trickled down to little girls. If you are an adult and want to look like Paris Hilton, go for it. But don't try to push that look for our daughters!

What do you think?

Failure

While I was pregnant, my body went through a number of changes. You expect pregnancy to affect things like your waistline (obviously), your moods, your boobs, etc. Well, it does that and a whole lot more.

But what I didn't expect was for my vision to suffer. It did. Big time. But I've now been not pregnant for 7 months and my vision still hasn't returned to "normal". Maybe this is normal now.

Today I had to go to that wonderful hell we all know as the DMV to renew my driver's license. And I (almost) failed the vision test. I had to read it FOUR times! And because I got most of it right the nice girl passed me and let me get my license. But wow. Talk about embarrassing. After pushing a baby out of my body I thought I was over being embarrassed by most anything...but I was wrong.

It's off to the optometrist I go...

This Week's Postings

I've posted quite a few things here without commenting much, so I want to briefly address each post and give an update on our sleep training.

1. Wordless Wednesday's post: Byodo-In Temple, Kahaluu, Oahu, Hawaii. The temple is a replica of the 950 year old Byodoin Temple located in Uji, Japan on the southern outskirts of Kyoto.We visited this temple in 2006 when I was just starting my second trimester of pregnancy and it was just beautiful. I couldn't help but take a great picture.

My blog isn't titled Wanderlust for no reason! I hope to do more traveling next year when pumpkin is a bit older.

2. The Working Dead: I have felt this way for awhile now. I don't hate my job, but it doesn't excite me. Now that I'm older I understand better what my true passions are and hope to pursue them and change careers. More on this to come in other posts.

3. 08 Candidate Tool: I just thought this was a great way to wade through the issues quickly and see who you should be supporting.

4. Sleep Training: Oh. My. God. What the hell did we do? Our happy daughter has now turned into a  whiny clingy mess and won't even co-sleep well now! After two days of trying to train her, we gave up because the personality change was so drastic that we had to.

But the damage has been done. We exacerbated the minor separation anxiety she had before and turned it into this panic anytime we leave her side. Ugh! We have a wonderful, sweet, happy child but wow...she is HIGH needs. Much more on this topic later.

Candidate match game

This is a pretty cool tool to see where you really stand in terms of a presidential candidate to support. I'm definitely democrat, but have never even heard of my perfect match. Try it out and see who most matches your ideals.

read more | digg story

The Working Dead : People Who Waste Their Lives Away - One Day at a Time

My former co-worker took personal calls on his cell phone while at work. His conversations always started the same way:
Co-worker: Sup?
Caller: Sup. What ya doin
’?
Co-worker: Nothing. Working.
Both answers were accurate. That’s because at this job, doing nothing was still considered “work” if you were on the clock.

read more | digg story

Wordless Wednesday

Sleep Training

Ugh. I missed posting yesterday and today's will be short as well. Work has been very busy and I'm sooo tired. We are trying to "sleep train" peanut for naps.

Our goal is to get her to nap in her crib instead of on Dad's chest (she had severe reflux and we fell into this habit to keep her upright so she could sleep pain free). Her reflux is under control. She is 7 months old as of Sunday. We've read all the books and don't want to leave her to cry it out. So we're trying the Sleep Lady Shuffle modified to fit our child. This involves Dad sitting by the crib and comforting her without picking her up. She is not sleeping. At all. She is crying and clutching dad's arms...pulling him towards her and reaching to be picked up.

This is so hard. I'm not even there! I'm at work! But I'm getting phone calls and text messages keeping me up to date. It's breaking my heart knowing she doesn't understand why she just can't sleep on Dad like always.

And of course, this bleeds over into night time sleep...my territory since Dad works nights. We co-sleep but she was so exhausted last night she just couldn't calm down. We were up from 2am-4am. And many times in between. We're committed to giving it 4 days. If we see no improvement at all then we table everything for two weeks and try again. If she's not ready, she's not ready. We want to help her learn to sleep on her own, but it's hard to balance the trauma with the learning.

Being a parent is tough sometimes! Has anyone been through this? Any advice?

Sesame Street Rocks

I was reading The Motherwear Breastfeeding blog and they have recently posted a couple of classic Sesame Street Clips.

The sad thing is, I don't even think they would show this today. I still remember watching Sesame Street as a kid and can sing some of the songs I learned. It seems like all of the kids shows today are all about pushing our kids to learn faster, be smarter or somehow better than average. Why can't we let our kids be kids?

Breastfeeding is natural and normal. Simple messages like this make my heart happy. I wonder if you can buy old Sesame Street episodes on DVD?

The future is the past...err, the past is the future

What would your future self come back and tell you today? Spend more time working. Don't get those highlights in your hair. Watch out for that car, he will run that light.

But seriously, if you could go back in time and tell your past self something what would it be? For me, it would be to take more chances, travel more and don't worry so much about what people think about you. Enjoy life and stop worrying so much.

Typical stuff, but sometime we need a reminder to live in the moment. I think having a baby does force you to live in the moment. The fascination of a tree blowing in the wind. Stacking the blocks, knocking over the blocks...stacking the blocks, knocking over the blocks. You can't help but live in the moment.