Baby Smiles!

Roxanne is smiling now. She usually only does it in the mornings when she first wakes up (I don't know who she got that trait from, since me and Justin are not exactly chipper when we wake up). It's so absolutely adorable. It's nice that she is getting more and more interactive. She is more and more alert, too. She likes hand puppets, and will look at some of her toys now, too. She's still not really that interested in most of them, and they seem to fascinate me and Daddy more than her, but still. This baby business sure is fun!

Wardrobe Nightmares

So, Roxanne just turned one month old yesterday. She's doing wonderfully, but she's wreaking havoc on my clothes (and hers). In the last three days, she's thrown up on me twice, and pooped on me once. And I'm not talking spit up. I'm talking throw up. Note the difference in verbs. One is much more active and far-reaching than the other. When she spits up on me, I usually just wipe it off and move on. With throw up, I have to change both shirt and pants. The problem is that I only have one pair of jeans that fit my totally weird postpartum figure. This means that today, when my friend came for a visit, I had to wear my Old Navy fleece pajama pants with snow flakes on them. I felt extremely sophisticated. I also have a limited number of shirts that accommodate my new mom figure, and so this has caused some issues, too.

I did go shopping with my mom a couple of weeks ago and bought a new work wardrobe at Ross. I love Ross. The one over by Lindbergh is fabulous. I got three dresses, a nice pair of pants, said pair of jeans, and four shirts for $65. Oh, this also includes a movie. My mom found Roxanne with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah in the movies there, and since it was $5, I just had to buy it. I haven't watched it since I was about 8 years old, so I'm excited to see it again. I know I liked it then. I was enamored with Steve Martin from watching Parenthood over and over again and I loved Daryl Hannah from Splash. I might have been kind of a weird 8 year old.

My hope is that new clothes will ease the transition back to work a little bit. I thought maybe if I was excited to wear new clothes, I'd be slightly less hysterical about leaving Roxanne at day care. I'm still forecasting lots of tears. Lots of them.

Smooth Transitions

It's amazing how quickly I'm becoming a mom. Even though I worked as a vet technician and/or a "kennel technician" (poop scooper) for over a year in high school, I'm still grossed out pretty easily. Mainly by things like snot and boogers. Well, for the last two days, I've thought nothing of dripping breast milk into my daughter's stuffy nose and then suctioning it back out along with all the yucky stuff in there. It's only been four weeks! By the time she's a year old I'll probably be snacking on her soggy, half-gummed-on graham crackers without a second thought. Ick. By the way, that trick with breast milk and the stuffy nose works wonders. Honestly.

Maternity Leave Bliss

I can't believe I'm already almost halfway through my maternity leave. I feel like I need another six months or so. I wish Justin and I could afford for me to not work, even though I like my job a lot. Unfortunately, we can't even afford for me to take a longer maternity leave. I knew from the moment I was pregnant that putting the baby in day care would be very very difficult. We have a fantastic in-home day care set up for Roxanne, and that helps, but I'm still having a hard time thinking about it. It's overwhelming. And a six week old baby is still so tiny. I wish America had standard 12 week maternity leave. That would be fantastic.

I am lucky that my employer is flexible enough to let me work part time when I come back if I choose to, but I'm not sure we can afford that. Adding the monthly expense of day care is a pretty big deal. At the very least, I hope to change my schedule to something like 7 to 3 so that I'll have more time with her. In a perfect world, I would love to work from home. Roxanne would be the perfect baby for that, since she's so calm and relaxed most of the time.

Either way, at least she's finally here, and she's perfect.