But I love the supportive community of motherhood so much, that I very much want to share what I’m thinking or learning through the process. So when I hesitate to write these blog posts I push through it imagining that those same idyllic mothers do not take recycling seriously. Idyllic non-recycling mothers, I JUDGE YOU. SEPARATE YOUR PAPERS AND PLASTICS!

I also hesitate to write openly about my spirituality because I have a vast audience of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists and Atheists. Perhaps there is a Muslim out there in the crowd!? Wouldn’t that be wonderful! Not only do I want to be very respectful of where YOU are coming from, I also have a personal rule of drawing certain lines. Despite the fact that I might seem to over-share in certain ways, my spirituality is the core of who I really am, and I tend to only share that with a select few people. Typically offline. In fact, most of those people don’t even read my blog. They don’t know what blogs are. By not sharing my spiritual beliefs online, I get to preserve that very beautiful and intimate part of my life and share it only with the realest and truest of my friends.

But I’m tossing all of that aside for this post because I haven’t slept in days. And yesterday I had Taco Bell for lunch even though I am on a diet. Rules!? What?! I’ve thrown them all out with yesterday’s bathwater in which Penelope peed.

We had a marvelous Thanksgiving. For five days straight I ate somebody else’s food, dirtied somebody else’s house, and took long showers while somebody else played with my kid. It was extraordinarily relaxing.

And then we came home.

At first I thought Penelope’s strange and fussy behavior was because of our red-eye flights and lack of sleep. Then I thought it was because she missed all the action and attention (“Grandparent Deprivation Syndrome” as my mother refers to it). And then I thought it was because of the strange balance of solids and formula and breastmilk that I’m trying to feed her in order to get her enough calories to sleep at night. And then yesterday it dawned on me that she hadn’t pooped since Sunday.

Come to find out, rice cereal and bananas and formula, all things that she had been eating over the past few days, lead to constipation. And every mother out there will understand what I mean when I say that I melted down with guilt. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN! I SHOULD HAVE GOOGLED THIS!

I read that pears would help with the constipation, and providentially I had picked up organic pears while at the grocery store on Monday that were just now perfectly ripe. (Yes, I’m only giving her organic fruits and veggies right now because it’s the one thing in a million that I can actually control… a little bit.) In the past 20 hours or so she has devoured an entire pear and loved every bite of it. And just a few hours ago finally pooped, had some milk, and is napping soundly.

All of this to say I was melting down yesterday with exhaustion and frustration and the realization that motherhood is SO not for perfectionists. And even though I am only one half of a percentage point perfectionistic, that one half was screaming very, very loudly. My house is a mess. Literally, there are leaves and pine needles and mud all over my floors from the Christmas tree and the dog. And if there is one thing I am anal about it’s my floors. My kid was crying constantly even when I danced around singing Christmas carols in my best Burl Ives voice. I could do nothing right.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks that I hadn’t once sat down to pray about my frustration. And so I did. And I got back to square one.

I think everyone has a square one – the one thing that drives all of their parenting. The one thing they hope to accomplish with their kid. Perhaps they want Judy to become president, or to marry a nice guy, or to not get knocked up in high school. Whatever it is, their battles and the way they choose to fight them comes back to square one.

I decided my square one a few days after Penny was born and I was riding high on the spiritual and hormonal journey of childbirth. I decided that the ONLY thing I wanted for Penelope was that she intimately know God, and that her life would reflect Him. I realized I couldn’t control if she was diagnosed with something, or became a convict, or God forbid was taken from me. And the only thing I wish to do is to create an environment in which she can observe a life that is driven by knowing God.

So yesterday when I sat down and got back to square one I realized my floors were ridiculous. And my Googling was ridiculous. And my attempts at making all the right decisions were ridiculous. And I just prayed til I was blue in the face that God would please help my baby poop. That He would take away her discomfort. That the pears would work.

Another rough night with very little sleep, another rough morning with a fussy baby and a face full of pears. And then one heck of a poopy diaper.

This post is ridiculously long. I’ll wrap it up by saying, why, oh why, does it take me so long to get back to square one? Why do I spend so much effort stressing and researching and trying to make the best parenting decisions all on my own when the answer is right in front of me? The answer being that the only strength or wisdom I could ever have with which to mother my child comes directly from my Creator… when I ask for it. That the only way I can hope to show her a life that is driven by intimately knowing Him is to let my faith be proven despite the circumstances.

I am so humbled today. Ironic as it’s the beginning of the Advent season, and I have been thinking a lot of how blessed Mary must have felt to be the mother of Jesus. How blessed I am to be Penelope’s mother. How blessed I am to receive grace from God. And how blessed I will be if she knows Him intimately.

This past weekend we finally got around to buying a piano – our Christmas ’09 gift to each other. We had hoped to find a cruddy old thing on Craigslist that sounded good but needed a facelift so we could paint it bright yellow. Don’t ask – something about our passionate love for Elton John. But instead we found a great deal on a nearly new (10 years old!) piano in great shape, so on Saturday we drove down to Murfreesboro with the very helpful Roberts brothers and moved the piano into our living room.

The look is a bit more formal than what I’m going for in the living room, but I can make it work. Having the piano has finally lit the fire under my butt to get the room looking a bit better, so I have ordered my curtain fabric online and can’t wait to get my drapes made. Yesterday while out browsing with Penny I fell IN LOVE with a clearance upholstered armchair and ottoman at HomeGoods which sparked the typical reaction that happens when I fall in love with things.

I couldn’t pass it up. And I wanted to buy it to replace Matt’s chair (The Dragon Throne) which we bought on the cheap under false pretenses a few years ago, and I have nearly-hated ever since.

But anyone who has ever tried to replace a man’s Dragon Throne will tell you that it is worse than pulling a cat’s teeth. It’s worse than having your house burn down. Nay, even worse than seeing an enormous cricket on your cutting board on the countertop. (Yes, the horrors belong in that order.)

Typically Matt doesn’t put  up much of a fight with my design choices. He might roll his eyes or give me a dubious glance, but he has learned to trust me and, in the end, be amazed. But replacing his Dragon Throne with this lovely, shapely, Danish modern chair was not going to happen. Regardless of the ottoman and my puppy eyes.

Even so, I made the purchase and spent last night moving furniture around in the room to see how we could accommodate both chairs as a compromise. I tried. I tried really hard. And I love having two armchairs as well as the sofa for extra seating.

Except I don’t want one of those armchairs to be Matt’s current Dragon Throne. I want the Dragon Throne to live upstairs in the den… and…

Now I want to get another chair.

With a few more aches, pains and divorce papers, I hope to have our living room up and running in the next month or so. Just in time for us to have to move everything around again to put up a Christmas tree.

Because… CHRISTMAS!

Having a child is similar to that, except I’d say it’s more like watching old home videos of you from years past. I don’t really know what this is like since my parents were both too cheap to purchase video equipment and also too technologically inept. But I have seen many home videos of Matt as a kid because his parents recognized the importance of having his future wife see him playing the trumpet and looking like a total nerd in junior high. They knew that he would one day grow up to be too hot to handle, and that when he brought home his girlfriend, who felt far too dorky to be dating such a stud, she would be encouraged to know that at heart, he was just as dorky as she was.

That is all neither here nor there. What I am saying is that Penelope is just like me. And she is just like Matt. And of course, she’s got her own smattering of plain old wonderful Penelope. But I have recently been smacked in the face by how similar she is to me, and how I need to compensate for that.

The kid doesn’t like to nap. She just doesn’t. She loves sleeping at night, and does it beautifully. But she is so absorbed with the busy life around her that she doesn’t want to take the time to sleep. She wants to keep on taking it all in.

At first I tried to find her internal schedule which barely exists. Because she’s like me. She’d rather fly by the seat of her pants and roll with the punches than have any sort of schedule. So I just ran with that. And I’d drag her shopping and to coffee with friends and she would enjoy it all, but be a basketcase for a few hours afterwards. Because at two months old, she’d be awake for three, four, sometimes five hours with just a fifteen minute snooze nestled somewhere in there.

I thought this was great! And she was oh, so flexible! And don’t I want my kid to be flexible!? Except, I never knew what to expect from her, and she never knew what to expect from me. There was absolutely no structure except at going-to-bed time. And then I realized I am raising a kid who has all my tendencies to live a completely un-structured life, and that will lead to her dating men with chemical dependencies.

So today I instituted a nap training routine. All in the name of saving Penny from men with chemical dependencies.

What I have learned from Matt is that structure isn’t all bad. Routine can be good. Especially for kids. Matt is a person who really enjoys routine and predictability. Keeping his word means everything to him. And I absolutely love that about him.

As I’m home all day with Penny, I have realized I need to be for her what Matt is for me. I have to be predictable. And when she knows what to expect from me she will trust me. And that can only be good.

Sure, I want my kid to be as flexible and happy as any other well-rounded kid out there. But she isn’t gonna be able to enjoy flexibility if she never ever naps.

I am four hours into this day of nap training, and I have had two wins and one loss. Which means it’s time for more coffee. And no, Penny, your mama isn’t chemically dependent on coffee. I mean…

And so we spend another day living spontaneously and pretending we’re in back in college where Today! Just! Might! Bring! ANYTHING!!!!

That’s how we spent our weekend, and I can’t tell you how spontaneous and doting Matt was. He bathed the dog, hung curtain hardware (his least favorite task in the whole world), mowed the lawn, took me shopping and for water ice, took me out for pad thai, and suggested we rent the first two Twlight movies because “I’m interested in it since you’re so infatuated.” While we were in TJ Maxx, I suggested we pick up a gift for his coworker who has an upcoming baby shower, but he only wanted to do spontaneous things – not check things off a to-do list.

Then yesterday afternoon my sciatica was bothering me, so I flopped on the bed to spoon Berlin. Matt sat down with his guitar and played all of my favorite George Harrison songs over and over again until I ceased whispering “Again! Again!” He painted my toenails despite much guffawing, and he complimented me on the strange cream-of-every-kind-of-vegetable-imaginable-and-wild-rice-soup that I concocted. Soup for lunch on a 95 degree day.

As we were laying in bed last night, Matt’s first dog, Toby, was referenced, and I asked for a reminder on how Toby died. “He died of heat stroke.” And that’s when I remembered the tragic story and broke into hysterical tears at the thought of poor Toby getting so excited to see his owners arrive home from vacation that he wound himself up into such a mess he died of heat stroke. I was laying there weeping leaving Matt very confused with my spontaneous outbreak, but when he realized the extent of my hysterics, calmed me down and made a mental note to never ever bring up Toby’s death ever again. Just store that memory in the silent box in the back of his brain where he also keeps the death of the Crocodile Hunter – another devastation I cannot bear to relive.

I know that I must be nearly unbearable to reside with at this point, as I’d imagine most pregnant women within are within days of their due date (see above hysterics). But my best friend and lover has taken such good care of me these last few days, that I cannot complain about the nagging aches and pains, the endless waiting. He has stepped in to walk me through this crazy time of my life and to face my fears right beside me. I am reminded again just how lucky I am to have him, and likewise how important it is to protect my time with him. He is and always will be the most important person in my life, the love of my life, and my soulmate.

So thankyou, Matthew, for making this weekend, possibly our last weekend alone, so much fun. For caring for me and making me slump over in laughter.

And for being taller and hotter than Robert Pattinson.

After much finagling, I finally picked her up today, and was surprised to see she was blue after being listed as grey. 8% of men are colorblind, so I chalked it up to that, and proceeded to drive her home with the volume cranked. Since we’ll be listening to music on Marshall 11 with sleeping kids in the back seat.

Most people would want to try out all of the funky features and see how it performs at high speeds. Not me. The first priority I had was to pull out both my infant carseat and my convertible carseat and snap them in with every possible configuration. Two rear-facing, one front facing, side-by-side, and with space in between. This I did crammed into the backseat myself, at 8 months pregnant, with both doors shut because there was a thunderstorm and torrential downpour taking place at the same time.

Take this photo, and then imagine, if you will, my big fat white booty squished in there between the carseats pushing, pulling and groaning to make sure the seats were secure. FOR MY INVISIBLE CHILDREN’S SAFETY!

From Daily Daguerreotype

Quickest route to premature labor EVER.

Tomorrow I’m taking the car for an inspection to make sure that no disasters are hidden under the roof. After which I plan on flying to DC to square away this oil spill disaster, then on to Baghdad to get our troops out, and then to Africa to stop world hunger. While my physique would beg to differ, I have never been so efficient, so stream-lined, and so thorough as I am now, at 35 weeks pregnant.

Throughout the process of renovating our house I have come to the conclusion that I have a love affair with two things, fabrics and lights. I’m convinced they can completely change the mood of a room, or a house even. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, I really don’t know) both light fixtures and fabrics seem to be a get-what-you-pay-for kinda scenario. I’ve found that I fall head over heels for very expensive light fixtures and then need to spend days finding affordable versions of them, which inevitably wind up with logistical problems.

Our dining room pendant should have taken fifteen minutes to install, but because I fell in love with a fixture that was not meant to be hardwired to the ceiling, Matt had to work some serious magic to get it up there. Three hours and much rolling of eyes later, he installed a free (!) and lovely solution that I adore:

For the bathroom I searched high and low for just the right fixture, splurged a little on price, and then found it necessary for Matt to completely rebuild the wall behind it with spackle since the previous fixture took up far more space. But again I was tickled pink with how it turned out.

This morning Matt is busy wiring up lights that I picked out for the second floor. Before the drywall was installed, I asked him to completely rewire the lighting above our stairwell so that the hideously ugly track lighting could be switched over to a a flushmount and tasteful wall sconce. I found the sconce that I wanted, but once again, it would take some jerry-rigging to hardwire it into the wall and hide a hole in the fixture. In fact I need to spend a few hours this week finding a small brushed nickel knob to hide said hole. Because I can’t just make it easy, can I?

Once Matt finishes installing the fixtures upstairs, we’ll basically be done replacing lights throughout the house. And to keep my husband from walking out on me, I’ve decided to just stick with table lamps from now on.

Although then I might need him to add more outlets to the house.

I am sooooo excited about this article (the second newspaper article I’ve been interviewed for… EVER!) because I really enjoy reading this health reporter’s columns as she’s very fair and balanced. And I think we could all use a bit more health reporting that is balanced. Something along the lines of OMG! SWINE FLU = THE APOCALYPSE!

Plus I love that she’s bringing attention to midwifery – a subject that sadly very few women know anything about. I know that I personally knew nothing about midwifery until I started doing my own research because it’s just not in the public eye.

At any rate, this is all falling on the week that we returned from a fun trip to the East Coast. Meaning I had no food in the house and the house was a mess. We had just finished painting the kitchen floor, so the kitchen was ripped apart. And the drywall for the upstairs gets delivered tomorrow morning with the crew right behind ready to start working. Tomorrow morning Matt has his board certification exam, which is just a tiny little bit important. Meaning if he passes he gets a nice fat raise. And the letters behind his name will now say “M.A.  B.C.B.A.”

Then we’ve got Matt’s climbing buddy coming in from Massachusetts on Saturday to go rock climbing for the weekend, and my mom arrives on Monday morning to hang out with me for a week. Which means I will frantically clean every nook and cranny of my house only to have her arrive and clean it all much better than I did the first time. And I will love and adore her for it.

And somewhere in there, I need to finish the nursery because the photographer from The Tennessean will be coming by to take a picture. Of me. At seven months pregnant and heavy enough to be a mean and competitive contestant on The Biggest Loser.

Strangely enough, all of this hectic activity is actually really good for me. I work best under tight deadlines, and frankly get a rush from anything that feels a little bit like a high school theatrical production.

But if I completely crash and forget to pick my mom up from the airport on Monday morning, can someone please tell her it was all because I opened my big fat mouth? She’ll roll her eyes and understand.

It was a late night – Matt accidentally downloaded a bad file that sent trojan viruses through the computer, which I stayed up late trying to repair. I think all is well now, but I will not be surprised if a window pops up with an African-American basketball player rapping about my credit score – I’ve already seen him once today.

When I did finally lie down for the night, Pendragon wouldn’t stop squirming around. Overall she’s a pretty mellow chica, but last night she was wide awake. There really must be something to the “sleep when the baby is sleeping” since she really, honestly kept me awake. Downside is I’m fairly certain “the baby” hasn’t slept in 24 hours.

I was up early to go to a friends house for a women’s prayer group and got absolutely lost on my way over there. So much for going into it “totally knowing how to get there.” I was calling her every five minutes for directions which seriously inhibited my driving as I’m not good at multi-tasking while driving a manual yet. I kissed the sky that I was in Tennessee as Mass drivers would have slaughtered me with my erratic behavior.

Overall it feels like a day that is challenging me to stay posicore. Just as I was about to kick the cat out of frustration, Matt texted me saying  ”Extra fun surprise coming!!” When I inquired further he responded, “Special treat.”

Instantly, out of nowhere, my mind ran to “I hope he’s won $250,000.” I’m not sure why that figure came to mind, or how exactly Matt would have won that sum of money, but that’s what I thought.

I’d also settle for a bouquet of flowers.

OR A WHOLE BOTTLE OF PINO GRIGIO ALL TO MYSELF.

Whaddya think it is? Bets and/or affirmations of the wine/$250,000 theories are welcome in the comments.

I caught a stomach bug that was goin around, and I’m pleased to say that it gave the Hof and I some good preparatory experience for what I’d imagine D-day will entail: multiple calls to the midwife (who was kind enough to coach us through my stomach bug in the midst of delivering babies), many, many clean towels, and my exclamation to everyone I was wheeled past in the hospital that “I’M TWENTY NINE WEEKS PREGNANT!” for fear they would inject me with some drug unsafe for my daughter in utero.

You hear these horror stories of people who were given a drug they were allergic to because their emergency medical band fell off, or a dosage gone wrong because the nurse was overworked, underpaid, and just needed a vacation forheavensake! Well I was determined not to be one of those people and questioned everything that went into my IV – what would the side effects be and um, hi, but my face is tingling, just as an FYI. At one point, when I reminded the nurse that “I’M TWENTY NINE WEEKS PREGNANT! And is this safe for the baby?” she responded with a snarky, “the doctor wouldn’t have prescribed it if it wasn’t safe for the baby.”

So that’s when I just shut up, told her she had gorgeous hair, and turned on the tele to watch Ben Harper on Austin City Limits. About five minutes after that miracle-working hydrating IV, I was ranting to Matt about how STUPID Reliant K was, how Ben was just letting it all go to pot, and myohmy how I LOVE THIS IV!

The whole ordeal was really rather comical (aside from the moments when I really feared my daughter was in danger), and we had a stupendous weekend with family although it was cut short. My biggest regret? Not being able to eat my sister’s slow-roasted Chicago beefs. I cut all of that meat the day beforehand and didn’t even get to taste it!

Now that we’re home, my system is slowly returning to normal. And frankly, as I head off to the grocery store today to fill our empty fridge, I look forward to doing so with a non-existant appetite – something I haven’t experienced in seven months. You really can’t imagine how nice it will be to walk past the bakery and not fight with myself over whether or not I need to buy five chocolate cakes… one for each workday BECAUSE I WORK SO HARD!

I never posted on his actual birthday because I was busy doing things with him that are not at all birthday-like whereby increasing the intense contractions of my guilt complex by T to the fifty-fourth. But I’m moving on, because I’m chalking it all up to being twenty-eight weeks pregnant and unable to shave my legs without an entire team of assistants.

This weekend he’s going to be at a motorcycle safety training course which means that he can then get his motorcycle license and buy a bike – his birthday gift. I’m guessing opening that Target bag with SIX HANES UNDERSHIRTS! on his birthday was almost as cool as buying a new cruiser. That’s what I told myself when I purchased them for him.

So for Matt’s thirtieth birthday, here are thirty things you didn’t know about my husband. I’ll try not to embarrass him too much, but isn’t that kinda the point of turning thirty?

1. He seems to have a strong opinion about illegal immigration according to a phone call I overheard last night, although I couldn’t really tell you what his opinion IS.
2. It bothers him to do any work (such as reading) close to his eyes without taking off his glasses first.
3. He then stores his glasses perched on his neck and just under his chin.
4. Or he loses them on the coffee table under magazines and the newspaper.
5. Losing his glasses doesn’t seem to bother him, but the new high-end scratch-resistant lenses really DO bother him because they smudge so easily. He wishes he hadn’t sprung for the expensive lenses.
6. While he enjoyed the television show “Flashforward” when it first came out, he told me last night in bed that “we’ll never watch that show ‘Flashforward’ again because it’s scary and I don’t want you to have nightmares.” Awfully kind of him, if you ask me.
7. He has nearly the complete discography of Miles Davis but rarely listens to it. When we sit down to read in the evenings, he inevitably puts on Bill Evans.
8. I always ask him to make the mac and cheese because he actually makes it according to the instructions on the box. I always leave out the butter. No wonder his is much better than mine.
9. Watching “Wipeout” stresses him out because the contestants let their butts hang down when climbing sideways on the rock wall. This is, apparently, not the best way to rock climb. Something about center of gravity.
10. Most Ben Stiller movies stress him out because absurd things keep happening to Ben Stiller over and over again and he just can’t catch a break. This is Matt’s worst nightmare.
11. The only juice he really likes is orange juice.
12. His favorite beer is Corona with a fresh lime slice. But he also loves a Harpoon UFO.
13. His favorite wine is Spanish Quarter Cab Sauvignon.
14. He probably hasn’t done a load of laundry since we got married. Likewise, I haven’t taken out the trash once.
15. He is extremely easy to feed. Nearly every day I make his lunch and pack it in his lunch bag for him. He takes it out of the fridge the next morning and has no idea what is in there until he eats it at lunch time. He has yet to complain about this system.
16. He gets really recalcitrant when his hair gets too long and hangs in his face. It’s been like that for about a week now.
17. He would collapse into a pile of anxiety if I ever purchased him a different anti-perspirant.
18. He wears a size 13 shoe, but a bit smaller in rock climbing shoes.
19. His favorite color is orange.
20. He prefers water-based frozen treats to milk-based frozen treats.
21. As soon as Berlin hears his key in the front door each evening, her tail starts wagging. He is her favorite person.
22. He wants to live in Colorado someday.
23. He prefers the NKJV translation of the Bible.
24. He plays a five-string bass because he loves “having that low D.”
25. He thinks John Mayer is a good guitarist and will be very embarrassed that I’m writing that here.
26. He has been known to sacrifice huge things for me.
27. He loves better than anyone I’ve ever met.
28. He will make the world’s greatest father – this coming from the girl who currently HAS the world’s greatest father.
29. He’s extremely ticklish and does NOT find it amusing when people try to tickle him.
30. He’s six feet, three inches of absolutely delicious yummitude, and I’m excited to bury my face into his chest for the next thirty years of his life… and more.

This basically wraps up the birthday celebrations for the week, although we still have lots of crumbled lemon poppyseed cake in Tupperware in the kitchen… and that giftcard to go out to dinner. Just think, next year we’ll need a babysitter for that dinner date.

I love you, and happy birthday, babe.