Seeking Nanny...Again!

The big sad news around our house is that we are loosing our nanny, Mandy. We LOVE Mandy. We also hate searching for a new nanny. Its tough to find a person that you trust to care for your baby. I've been searching now for about a week and there are plenty of qualified, good people out there that could care for Fay just fine. But I want the really exceptional one that I feel comfortable inviting into my home.

I'm not sure how I did it the first time, perhaps it was just luck. But when Mandy comes each morning at 8am sharp, I consistently end up talking to her about Fay, or about other things until I'm running out the door, almost late for work. We love to ouu and ahh over Fay. We laugh about her when she's grumpy and stubborn (silly baby! you're not in charge!), and we get excited about her little accomplishments and changes. Mandy has declared that she would like to have Fay walking by the time she leaves at the end of August. I doubt this will happen since Fay will only be 10 months but she is well on her way. Did I mention that Fay is pulling up on furniture and walking while holding on (for dear life and balance) to my fingers? Much of this is due to Mandy's encouragement I have no doubt.

So now I'm on the hunt. I have 3 weeks to go before Ryan and I leave for a Nebraska vacation and have to return to a home minus the Manders (as we like to call her). Cross your fingers for me.

(Photo at top is courtesy of Manders. One of the many creative playtimes with Fay -- put her in a diaper box!)

First work week without THE PUMP

Last weekend I had the spa day on Friday which forced me not to feed Fay for 7 hours straight with the boob. We had been planning on starting weening soon because we have a vacation at the end of August where we will be apart from Fay for 4 days (eek!). So I thought I might as well continue weening last Saturday and see how it goes.

Surprisingly it went pretty well. I fed Fay from the boob when she first woke up and any time she asked until her first nap. Then every feeding after that I gave her either formula or mama milk from the bottle. She would nuzzle into my chest to ask for it and I would just redirect her to the bottle.

Then I fed her for her bedtime feeding from the boob. When it was finally time, I was DYING to give her the boob. Not that I was in pain or engorged, but I just missed it all day long. I really do like the fact that I can give her something no one else can.

On Monday I left for work without my pumping supplies for the first time in 4.5 months. Wow, lots of pumping that was. Now I go through my work day and I don't have to schedule it in. I was always watching the clock to make sure I didn't miss my pumping window. The only part I did enjoy about pumping at work was having a 15 minute break to sit and think about Fay. That was kind of calming and nice.

Happy birthday Mommy!

Yesterday was my birthday. My 36th birthday to be exact. And my first birthday as a mom. It was also a Friday which is one of my new weekend days ever since going back to work at 4 days a week.

So I was pretty excited to not work on my birthday, spend the day with Fay, and go out to a special dinner with Ryan in the evening. But when I went to get Fay at 5:55am there was a little greeting card in her crib with the word "Mommy" scribbled on the envelope in what appeared to be crayon.

After nurisng Fay we opened the card together and it told me that Daddy was sending me away to a special place for my birthday and that Fay would miss me.

I was put into a cab at 9:30 and sent to an address in Chinatown. I arrived and discovered the address housed a day spa. I then proceeded to have 7.5 HOURS OF TREATMENTS. Geez! It didn't seem that long when I was doing them all. Heres the run down. I got 1) A full body scrubbing/cleansing. 2) Green Salad while waiting for 3) Facial. 4) Ham and Egg sandwich while waiting for 5) 2 hr massage. 6)Snack of dried fruit, nuts and RITZ CRACKERS! (my favorite) while waiting for 7)Pedicure and Manicure.

It was 4:30 before I looked at the clock and rushed out of the spa, my boobs a yearning for some nursing. (I asked Ryan if I should bring the pump on my surprise outing since I'm still nursing Fay and he thought I should be back by 3pm. That seemed long, but doable)

I have to describe one of the treatments which was the most foreign to me. I've gotten plenty of massages and pedicures. I've even had one or two facials. But I've never had a full body scrubdown like I received immediately upon arriving at the spa.

Normally when you enter a massage room, the masseuse asks you to disrobe as they leave the room for privacy. I had no idea what treatment I was receiving upon arriving, but I knew something was up when the woman giving me the treatment asked me to disrobe and step into an oval tub while she stood there waiting. I have no modesty issues, but it was different enough to point out.

I stepped into a bath of flower petals and lemons. The woman squeezed the lemons into the water and then bathed me. She took a washcloth to my arms, legs, chest and back. It was pretty nice. The bath was relatively brief and next she led me to a table and instructed me to lie face down. The table felt like a thin water bed; I was lying on some kind of gel filled padding. The woman began to slather some kind of exfoliating soap/gel over my entire body piece by piece.

After a solid 30-40 minutes of scrub down, she took a break and was shuffling around the room preparing something. My eyes had a towel over them so it was all unknown to me. I assumed she would be cleaning me again in the oval bath because I had gotten pretty covered in the soap/gel.

I started feeling some mist on my left side and I thought to myself "geez, its been so professional and well done so far. I'm surprised she is accidentally splashing me while she's preparing my bath. Of course she wasn't "accidentally" splashing me. She was starting up this LONG horizontal pole of 5 shower heads. She moved the shower heads back and forth above my body and rinsed me off, all the while massaging me a bit.

I started thinking...."wow, I wonder if anyone in this world wakes up to a treatment like this. Some rich royalty somewhere has a woman spend an hour and a half in a dark room cleaning them before their day begins." I doubt it.

So that was the start to my birthday. Which has now been renamed my-best-birthday-ever. After a full day of treatment, I went home to play with my baby girl and then Ryan took me out for a yummy dinner and some music. We saw 2 African Jazz groups at Joe's Pub and they were amazing.

Now I'm just a little worried about what I can possibly do for his birthday. But I have until December.

4th of July on Fire Island

For the 4th of July holiday, we spent the long weekend on Fire Island with friends and babies. We rented a house and invited 3 couples to go in on it with us. In total there were 8 adults, 2 babies and one toddler. It was an exhaustingly fun weekend.

Fire Island is a favorite weekend getaway for Ryan and I ever since we got a 1/4 share of a house last summer. We spent 5 weekends in the Kismet area of Fire Island last summer and grew to love the campy feeling of the island, the short commute, the sparse beaches and the friendly people.

There are no cars allowed on the island, so there are also no "roads" on the island. The streets consist of sidewalks for walking and biking. Lots of biking. You often hear the "tink, tink" sound of a bike as it is approaching you from behind. You also hear this sound when a bike is approaching an intersetion of sidewalks, as if it is a car winding up a curvy mountain pass and cannot see the approaching cars around the bend.

This past weekend we shared the house with our long time friends Joe,Vanessa (with Joseph - 2yrs), Liz (with new boyfriend Lester), and our new neighborhood friends Dia, Josh (with Maurice -- 10 months).

I don't need to recount many events of the weekend activities. The days seemed to run the same. The moms were up at the crack of dawn with little ones. Sometimes the dad's arose early for coffee hankerings. Then there was time spent on the beach, walking throughout the island, much time in the kitchen and then the evenings after the babies went down.

It seemed that each day belonged to one of the babies for the purposes of disrupting the other babies' sleep. The first night we were there, Maurice cried and cried and cried, thus preventing Joseph from going to bed much before 11pm. The second night Fay was up at 3:30, staring and screaming at her parents like a caged animal from her porta-crib. Finally I nursed her back to sleep. The third night, Joseph refused to go to sleep and he sat up with the parents while we played two rounds of celebrity (charades with a twist). I think Joseph watched 3 or 4 rounds of his favorite Sesame Street episode that night. But Joseph was kind enough not to keep the other babies awake -- just himself.

I must note, for my own humor as I read this post in the future, that Joe gave the most ridiculous clue during our game of celebrity. Celebrity is like charades, but during the first round you can actually speak to describe the clue. The clue is always a well-known person (celebrity). Joe's clue was Gary Gnu (a puppet from the 70's children's show, The great Space coaster). Instead of referencing the tv show. Joe decided to describe the first name "Gary" by referring to a favorite hero of his. He said "The first name of the inventor of Dungeons and Dragons". To which his team replied..."what?!". Of course, no normal person knows who that inventor may be. And we did not win that round.

   

For Fay readers, I will tell you that she crawled A LOT this weekend and interacted really well with the other kids. She showed much interest in Joseph the 2yr old. He would run around and she would try to catch up to him as her belly dragged across the floor in her pseudo crawl. Any day now she'll get that belly off the floor. She looks like she's just about there.

Also, Fay hates the beach. After about an hour on the beach, she would get cranky, even before naptime, and as soon as we left, she would cheer up. Also, one day, I was holding her hands and helping her "walk" on the beach. She "walked" directly towards the path which would exit her from the beach. Smart cookie. Knows what she wants.