First and foremost - Joshua has a new little cousin, as of yesterday. Felicia's sister Rachel (and, incidentally and far in the background, where he should be, her husband Erik) gave birth to a 6 pound, 9 ounce daughter named Hannah, after a disgustingly ridiculous number of pushes, like, four. We're hoping Felicia's next delivery is like that: get to the hospital, get your epidural, go "eh", and there's yer baby, plop, just like that.
(Rachel's story, I'm sure, would be rather different. But then, what does she know? She was on heavy medication at the time. MY version is probably no less fictional than hers would be. And Erik was in a chauffer-driven car on the way out from NYC for most of it, so I think we're pretty much free to make up our own story here, people.)
Joshua would be absolutely thrilled to hear he has a new little baby girl-cousin, if only he spoke English well enough to understand what we were trying to tell him. Felicia and I, however, are thrilled, and we can only assume that Grandma Jo is beside herself, since she's been too busy with SOMETHING for the past couple days to complain about the lack of blog activity.
Meanwhile, back on the home front...
WE'RE DEEP IN THE MIDST OF THE WEANING PROCESS.
Sorry for shouting, but it seemed appropriate. Consider it a fair, if virtual, taste of the decibel level that we've had in the house the past couple days, since we began this whole dramatic change in our entire delicately adjusted way of being as a burgeoning family.
Hey, we had to do it sometime. The spur, I think, was Felicia's increasing desire (entirely unrelated, I'm sure, to Hannah's arrival in the world) to Be Pregnant Again, and thus to Have Another Boo. This, obviously, is not so easy when one is still breastfeeding, and thus pumping all those ovulation-suppressing hormones into one's system (and I'm not talking about mine, here, people). So the Decision Was Made that we should start the process of getting this Boo off his Booby, and we put the plan into effect a couple days ago. Mom would not breastfeed him except at night (*), and would stop pumping except for (temporarily) doing one session before she leaves for work, so the Grandma and the Daddy would have at least one bottle of booby-milk to give the Boo when he wakes up in the morning, and to eke out thereafter through the day as needed. (Since Daddy is up about, oh, four HOURS before the Grandma every day, and since the Boo is still at least somewhat hungry for the booby-milk when he first wakes up, this means Daddy has gotten it all and that it's all gone by the time Grandma wakes up and gets her sorry butt moving in the morning. HA. Serves her right for getting a decent night's sleep, the early bird gets the worm, gotta strike while the booby-milk is hot, and all that.)
* You can see the obvious loophole. Given that His Poopiness has NEVER consistently slept through the night, this "no booby-feeding except at night" loophole is big enough to drive a milk truck through. What this means, in practice, is that for the time being, he's getting about 80% of his daily caloric intake between 6pm and 5am, when he and his momma are conspiring to MORE than make up for all the booby-feeding sessions they're missing during the day. But I digress.
And the corrollary to this loophole is that Daddy and Grandma get to struggle by all day on nothing but solid food, water, juice, and whole milk (so sue us, we accellerated the American Academy of Pediactrics-approved schedule for introducing cow's milk by a month) all day, and then Momma gets to come swooping in at the end of an increasingly hairy afternoon and play Supermom, presenting the Superboobs to the rescue of us all. At least until Daddy insists that it's time for the other shoe to drop, anyway, and tells her she has to give him a glass of cow's milk or a sippy-cup full of water, just like the rest of us mere mortals.
To be fair, Felicia has been surprisingly good about following along with The Plan, now that we've finally decided to implement it, after many months of delay and hemming and hawing. To my surprise, she's even decided that it's time to start enforcing the Sleep-Through-the-Night Plan, AT THE SAME TIME, which deprives them both of some otherwise easily-justified midnight booby-time. (No, all you moms out there who are wondering, she is not suffering from exploding-boob syndrome, nor is she leaking all over herself, nor is she in serious pain. Sure, her relevant bits feel a bit like she had a silicone implant by the end of the day, but she's otherwise fine - though I keep warning the Boo to stand back when it comes time to do his bedtime feeding, for fear it'll be akin to drinking from a fire hose. Still more proof that Felicia was genetically engineered to be Supermom, if any more were necessary.)
So, we're into Day Three of this scheme, and so far so good. Mom hasn't had her entire upper superstructure explode (knock wood), the Boo hasn't starved yet (ditto), Daddy is still here to write it all about (ditto ditto), and although Da Gim is feeling pretty neglected and gunshy, even HE is still relatively intact, a few pulled dog-hairs notwithstanding.
Grandma and Grandpa, however, are AWOL, so it's hard to say how they feel about this whole thing. Grandpa Ken returned from Michigan last night, and shlepped the Grandma off to the coast within a record-setting 15 hours, meaning he'd hardly even taken his laptop out of his briefcase before he'd kidnapped my main helpmate in this whole daytime childcare/weaning scheme.
Shocking. Time to import another grandma, for backup.
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