Anne Nahm

Here’s an artist’s rendition of me, shopping at Target yesterday with my youngest child in her baby carrier. Calm and relaxing at Christmas time, no?

If you will look closely, you will see my child has discovered a new talent my first baby, being in a body cast at this age, never developed:

Oh yes. The baby used to just kick me in the crotch when she’d get bored. Yesterday? She actually learned how to use her monkey toes to grab my pubes through my pants (unbelievable!) and then put her body weight to bear on them. Good times. Good, bruisey times.

So now starts the time in the baby’s life when I require her to wear some binding socks at all outings.

Here’s my embarrassing confession of the day: As much as I think I’m growing and learning from this blog, I still get slapped upside the head when I realize that I am still hiding, hiding, hiding. It’s like my brain has a glove box, and occasionally when something unpleasant happens? Whoops! I just slip it into the box and forget about it like an emergency pack of smokes that I know are there but don’t know-know are there.

I made an appointment for the three-year-old to go back to Dr. Supa Dupa last month.** She’s been waking up in the middle of the night crying about knee pain. It’s pain in the same side as her hip problem, and mostly all the internet says is that a lot of time hip problems present as knee pain.

When I stop to actually think about it, I get effed in my head pretty quickly. At nine months old, her bones were soft enough to be molded with three months of casting. I know that the next step (then – at under a year old) was an ‘open reduction’ which involved surgically cutting up her hip bone and whittling it down to fit. I don’t know what they do now, at almost 4 years old. I don’t really want to know unless it turns out I need that kind of information.

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It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing, and I just want to shut the fuck up about it now. Anyway, now you know. That’s what we’ll be doing Wednesday.

** When the three-year-old was 9 months old, she went into a spica body cast for three months to treat hip dysplasia. You can read all about it here, but essentially it is a problem with her hip. It is usually not recognizable until the child starts to walk. They develop a limp because the leg bone does not fit into the hip joint properly. Unfortunately, by the time the child has started to walk, the window of opportunity to fix the problem easily has passed.

Hello darlings!

We saw Dr. Supa-Dupa on Monday. The ultrasound suggested that there is a “95% chance Baby will never need treatment” for hip dysplasia. And yet, we still need to get an x-ray in 4-6 months to completely rule it out. So on the fear factor? Yay! Probably no hip problems. On the pain-in-the-ass factor? Boo! Still need to follow through with all the doctor appointments hither and yon.

So that was Monday, Anne, and no offense, but where the hell have you been since then? Glad you asked.

No seriously. Glad.

My mom has been here, and by the third day of her cleaning, cooking, and caring for my children, I managed to drag myself out of bed. A sane woman would have taken a shower, thanked the mom kindly, and offered to help take on some chores. So you know what I did, right?

I thought we had just better have a big assed garden party. LOOK AT ME, WORLD! I AM EFFING CAPS-LOCKED-OUT-OF-CONTROL. HAVE ONE MONTH OLD CHILD AND AM THROWING A PARTY. (And by the way, this is how I worded the invitation to the party, decorated the cake, and had stenciled on the balloons.) Of course, if there was any truth in advertising, it would have all said, “my long suffering mom threw a party and let me get dressed in a cute outfit and take all the credit in front of my friends.” Still? Whooo-hooo! Party!

So 15 adults and 4 kids later, I have gotten those coveted comments from my other mommy friends. You know, when they say, “you are just a Martha Stewart Maven”** and you’re sure they mean A) the worst possible insult at your prissy hor’deurves and B) they are super impressed that you hand placed those fresh blueberries into 30 individual tartlets. (again, read: Anne’s mother stayed up all night hand placing those blueberries.)

Of course, then I had to mess it up by braying like a total jack-ass “Hahaha! Actually? My mother is here, and she did everything. In fact, I just locked her in the basement about 3 minutes before you got here. But thanks for the compliment!” To her credit, I could hear my mother’s muffled voice through the locked door, saying something that sounded suspiciously like, “Oh, it was easy, really! Glad to help!”

So Mom, even though I pray on a daily basis that you never, ever know about this blog, still? Yay! Thank you! And if you happen to be reading this, please don’t ever, ever mention it to me or I will have to totally stick a fork in my eye or something. Kthnx!

**and typing that phrase, I have the sudden epiphany that my friends are not cool either if they say things like that.

My sister came up for the festivities. My thin, pretty, carefree sister (is there any other kind? For me, no). While she was here, she said the following completely-like-her things:

1) “Anne, for every one more kid you have, I decide to have one less.”

and

2) (to my mom): “Come over here and snuggle with me so I can tell you how much I hate my best friend.”

I swear I heard these exact words come out of her mouth.

Hi my internet darlings. Oh, how I’ve been missing you.

*Tomorrow we head off to Dr. Supa-Dupa’s hospital to get the Baby checked for the Hip Dysplasia. Suspect I may want to eat a bullet by tomorrow night with all the 10+ hours of driving and doctoring. Does anyone know the appropriate vintage wine to pair with a one bullet meal?**

*I have been pigging out at the All You Can Sleep Buffet. Yay sleep! Yay moms!

*And just as a little note about how silly the husband and I are? We keep trying to spell secrets in front of my mom, since that’s our main trickery for the 3 year old. My big retort when the husband does it (right with my mother sitting on the couch across from us)? “Uh…. my M-O-M can S-P-E-L-L.” Sadly, I don’t do this sarcastically, but rather to clue him in without my mom knowing.

Entitled: The Husband, He Doesn’t Care at all for the Jim-Hat

HUSBAND: “So what’s the date for your six week check-up?”

ME: “You know what sucks about that? The birth control pills don’t even kick in for a week after I get them from the doctor. It’s going to be *seven* weeks before we get down. Or… I guess we can use condoms.”

HUSBAND: “Uhmmm….. Could you call and see if the doctor will write the prescription for a week before your check-up? That way, we’d be good to go once she gave you the ‘all clear’.”

ME: “Uhmmm… I am so not calling and making that request. I’d sound like a complete horndog.”

HUSBAND: “Isn’t breastfeeding a natural birth control? We don’t need a condom. We don’t need to wait.”

ME: “Nooooo. No way at all. If I got pregnant right now, I’d kill one of us. Probably me, just to punish you.”

HUSBAND: “You won’t get pregnant. No one ever gets pregnant when they are breastfeeding.”

ME: “How about this? For every ‘accidental’ baby I have that way, I get to cut off one of your testicles?”

HUSBAND (considering for a moment): “That’s fine.”

ME: “That’s fine???”

HUSBAND: “Sure. We can only make that mistake twice, and I’ll never have to wear a condom again.”

ME: “Just so you know, I’ll wear each ball I cut off on a twine necklace, and I’ll tell anyone who asks exactly what it is.”

HUSBAND: “That’s fine too. You could make the accidental babies’ umbilical stumps into earings. Then you’d have a body-parts jewelry set.

**After some thought about how grossly inappropriate it is to joke about that kind of thing, I realized that the appropriate liquor for a one bullet meal is of course… a shot. Ha….ha.

Wow. We left the house yesterday at 9:00 in the morning. We got back at 8:00 at night. Can more really be said about this trip?

Oh yes.

I can tell you that 8 hours of driving in a car with two kids is no effing fun.

I can tell you that waiting in a 9×12 foot cubical for 1 and a half hours for the doctor is not fun. Although the one battered copy of Ranger Rick did keep the older daughter entertained for… oh, 10 minutes of that time.

I can tell you that next time, I will remember to pack more than 2 diapers in the diaper bag (damnit, damnit, damnit!)

I can tell you that we get to do this all again the first week of February. Because? Although Dr. Supa-Dupa is cautiously optimistic about the Baby’s condition, there is always another test to be run. Yay test.

The highlight of the trip was sailing down the highway while both children were miraculously quiet. A cute little red Mustang zoomed by us with the license plate, HOTTACO. To our immense disappointment, we sped up to find that the driver was a geriatric Caucasian male. Hot taco indeed.

I am adoring reading all the blogs of you bacon loving bastards. I am selfishly using my non-nursing time to bitch, but I am reading you and loving you from afar,

Anne

Here are some dirty little secrets about me for your entertainment:

1) I make bacon about once a month for weekend breakfast. The husband, he likes well made bacon. And I like him. So I’ve been makin’ the bacon since we were married 5+ years ago.

2) This means that I have either burned bacon to the degree that it turns to dust when bitten into, or is so greasily undercooked that it oinks in pain. For the last 5+ years, people. Never, not even one time, has there been bacon cooked even to the standards of Denny’s night shift.

3) Be it ever so morally wrong or politically incorrect, I blame my inability to cook pork products on my fabled Jewish ancestry. This means that one great-great-great-great-grandsomething mixed in with all the other gentiles prevents me to this day from ever making nice with the bacon. Can I get an “Oy Vey” people? (Ok, probably not. Probably, you are closing up the browser right now in disgust at my insensitivity) And yet? Once a month, I must still attempt to overcome this hurdle. And once a month, I fail.

4) So, Sunday morning, over the greasy smell of burnt bacon, I asked the husband, “Do you think it’s too offensive to write a blog blaming my Jewish ancestry on my inability to cook bacon?”

The husband says, “No. It’s just not funny.”

“Why not?”

“Jewish ancestry shouldn’t prevent you from cooking bacon, just eating it.”

Damn it, damn it damn it.

Anyway, we are traveling to see Dr. Supa-Dupa today so maybe news tomorrow.

Also, I am missing some of your posts – I noticed a few never appeared on my friends page even though they were posted on your journals. Anyone else having this problem?