The Happiest Baby Around

Desmond smiled more at the twin's birthday on the 26th then ever before. It gave me lots of chance to get super adorable pictures. He doesn't photograph very accurately, which is weird, but he's cuter in person. These pictures are still super cute though! I was talking to him and family was walking around and that is what he's smiling at. That and I think he thought the flash on the camera was amusing.

I find it quite true that a baby's smile is like falling in love.

Desmond And The Peas

I decided we needed to spend more time in the outdoors, so the day before yesterday we went outside and picked peas. He had been wide awake until we got outside. He fell asleep as soon as I got the stroller out the door, slept through the bumpy ride across the lawn to the garden, and then woke up for a couple pictures and went back to sleep again.

In the house he woke up again, but was grumpy. Apparently, he already doesn't like peas. Even so, he's adorable hating peas.

Is It True With Babies Too?

Desmond's favorite new game this week is to sit in his bouncy chair and have me put a receiving blanket up at a neck and then he kicks it off. He'll happily do this about 50 times in a row. Norman extended the game by putting the blanket all the way over the chair and Desmond kicked it off faster and faster every time. I told him that getting out from under a blanket is one of the tests they use to determine IQ in dogs. I wonder if it's the same for babies. Either way, Desmond is one smart dog.

I'm So Funny

The other day I realized I'd been watching too many comedians when I ran across two incidents that seemed like they would fit in a stand-up routine.

As I put Desmond in the car after a visit to grandma's I congratulated him on staying awake the whole way there. It's a block. Like maybe 3 minutes if we get stuck behind a tractor. But usually he's asleep by the time we make it to the end of our drive way. And it occurred to me that to infants, cars must seem like teleportation devices. You get in, then the next thing you know you're across town at Starbucks (mommy needs her Frappichino) or in the freezer section of Wal-Mart. It's like magic. What a let down when you stay awake the whole way and realize the truth.

Melissa and I were buying ice at Wal-Mart when I decided to wanted to grab a parenting magazine since I only subscribe to one right now. I found one. One magazine. I examined the cover, decided it looked good and then looked for more options. I walked all the way down the row. There were no more. There were two magazines about chickens. And like six on fishing. But one on parenting. It doesn't give me hope for the future. For the future of chickens perhaps...

Then when I got home I realized I must have the unavoidable "baby-brain" syndrome because when I sat down to read my new parenting magazine I opened it up and discovered it's the one I subscribe to and I'd already read the whole thing.

Baby Nicknames

When my brother was yet to be born, everyone called him Buster. When we were little, he called me Honey (because my parents did), and I called him Bub, Bubbie, or Bubba. When our twin cousins were born they called us Nuk and Bunny (Nik and Bethany), and their Dad was Honey.

When Des was first born I called him Baby Bug because he curled up like a pill bug all the time. In the weeks since I have found I call him Mr. Baby, Baby Man, Bay-Beh, Chick Chick Chick, Sweet Heart, Sweetie Pie, and Little Baby Man. I'm sure those will morph into new names as he grows.

My last baby was my dog Pumpkin Spice who is a tiny Papillion Chihuahua cross. She weighs 3.6 lbs and is full grown. Her call-name is Spicy, she rarely hears Pumpkin Spice. One of my nicknames for her is Chicken Poodle. I don't know why. My other dog is Cindy Lou Who, the geriatric Chihuahua. I call her Cindy Windy or Cindy Loudle Whodle. She doesn't care.

Background In Dressage = More Prepared To Parent?

As I fed Desmond at 4 AM the other morning I made a connection between Dressage and parenting from something Melissa and I had been discussing the day before. Unlike a discipline like Western Pleasure (which I am so excited to learn with Debbie!) which you can learn...like, all of, Dressage is never done. You can buy a finished Western Pleasure horse. I will cost you $20,000+ for a truly finished, push-button, win-at-the-top-level one, but you can buy one. There is really now such thing as a finished Dressage horse. You can be finished 1st Level or finished 3rd level or what not, but even the horses doing the Olympics are still in training. They are not finished. Parenting is kind of the same thing; you're never a finished parent. You may know more than most. You may have "mastered" certain levels. But there's always more to learn, more surprises to be thrown your way, more ways to learn how to teach your child something that you're going to have to find because they aren't getting it the way you're trying to teach it.

I've always said that kids, horses, and dogs are very similar in that they all are happiest and learn best with patience, consistence, and well-defined boundaries. But I hadn't before made the connection to Dressage. When you show, you want any errors to be yours. You want that horse score to be high, you want your rider score to take any blows that might be judged on your test. When you parent, you want any mistakes to be yours and not your kids. You want them to do their best. You want to build a strong foundation so they always have something to fall back on. You want them flexible with a good work ethic, moving through life animated at a nice rhythm, showing that they enjoy themselves and not looking resistant, stressed, or unnatural. Just like the dressage training pyramid. And additionally, you could beat your kid into submission just like you might be able to beat your horse into frame, but it isn't truly teaching them anything but how to best avoid pain. You have to actually communicate with them to get the best results.

It makes me want to get back in the saddle all that much more!

Prepare To Be Unprepared

Norman and I did our best, or at least a 3/4th-assed job, at being ready for the baby. We waited till be had a salary to budget, health insurance, and me through University. We had everything in the way of a crib, swing, bouncy chairs, etc. We read (I read) books on pregnancy and subscribed to about 3 magazines on the subject. I still felt unprepared as we sat in the hospital waiting for the little guy. Haven't never been a person who liked babies, I hadn't interacted with many. I felt I should have read at least every book I bought if not more. However, at the hospital I found myself listening to the Dr. and nurse explain things that I already knew because I had read it somewhere. Online in a forum or in a book or magazine on in the child-birth class we went to at the hospital. This brought me to the disturbing conclusion that though I didn't feel we'd done absolutely everything we could to be mentally and emotionally prepared to do our best by this little guy, a lot, if not most, did far less. Everyone in the family was bragging about how well prepared we were and how we knew so much, so the combination made me feel better. The first couple weeks were hard, trying to figure out how to keep him happy and nursing and do what was best for him, which is not feeding him constantly, though that might be an immediate solution to crying. At 7 weeks now, I feel much more competent in taking care of him, and though I'm sure I could have read a lot more, the only thing I really could have done to make things easier on me as I started caring for him would have been to hang out with a mom with a new born who knew what to do and get a feel for it first hand. And I have worked out my own system that not everyone does, so it would still have not been a perfect plan. My advice is: take a class at the hospital, ask everything you can think of, read everything you can get your hands on, and then realize that babies don't read the books and you have to take your lead from them. Trial and error is okay in areas like feeding and sleeping schedules, not in anything regarding safety. Parenting magazines rock because they give you things to look forward to like adorable toys and big milestones.

Where The Blog Name Comes From

I am a horse person. That comes with many oddities. I always have alfalfa in my pockets, I own "horse shirts" (permanently grass stained, oil stained, or medication stained), I tell the dog to "HO", I know more about my horses' heritage than my own, etc. Another quirk is how horse people often have horses and other animals long before kids and it's a whole culture. So we're already used to everything in horse-terms. It's a little foreign to switch to people-terms at first. So when I discussed having a baby with my husband I said things like, "It just depends on how easy I take." "We'll see how big he is when he hits the ground." "I wonder if you throw your brown eyes." "I wonder what it will be like to be in-foal." "Hurry, we'll be late for the vet's....I mean doctor." And so on. My best friend and riding coach teased me a lot. Someone asked how my baby was and I said, "Oh he's at the trainer." And they looked at me funny. "Oh, you mean my PEOPLE baby. He's good." I have spent three years with my horse Spotless being my baby. He's now 3 and started under-saddle and will hopefully be sold by the end of the summer. Now I have to get used to the people-terms for my people-baby.

The Greatest Adventure Of All

My husband and I got married on June 6, 2004. I was 19 and he had just turned 20. One of his friends was not allowed to attend the wedding because we "were too young and it wouldn't last". It was the summer of my freshman year and Norman had just finished his first year in Culinary school. The first year of marriage was hardest because we were both in school and sometimes brought in all of $30 for the month. Our grandparents sent us food and we had no tv. My grandparents gave us a gas card to use on their account. That is a memory now, 6 years later, as I sit nursing our son, Desmond.

I graduated in 2008 with my Elementary Teaching degree and Norman has been working as a chef at Wild Horse Casino for about 3 years now. After a miserable stint at a nursing home he landed the gig at the casino and got promoted to salary last year. That's when almost everything we had set as conditions to have kids was met. We needed to both be done with school, have a salary to budget, and have health insurance. We gave up on the house of our own condition, that's still a long way off. We rent a house from my grandparents for just the cost of utilities. Because they're amazing like that.

So, last winter I substitute taught through my pregnancy and May 12, at 2:05 in the afternoon, Desmond Andrew Lewis Shaw announced his arrival with a shriek and stole of hearts of all who saw him. It's definitely be life changing. I'm still not sure what to make of it all yet. He's 7 weeks old today and it's flown by.

So, enjoy my random thoughts, stories, and revelations as I figure out this whole "mom" thing. It might be entertaining and there will definitely be pictures.