My heart hurts today. It’s day three of daycare for Wesley, and this morning’s dropoff was horrible. He’s normally really easy-going and happy to play with toys and other babies, and we tried to talk it up to him beforehand (“You get to play with babies all day!”) but dropoffs got progressively worse this week, culminating in this morning whereby the teacher had to hold him on her lap while he scream-cried for me as I tried to back out the door.

I got in the car and cried.

I’ve felt so, so guilty and awful and on the verge of tears all day today. He’s fine, I know he’s fine, but it’s still so hard to leave him. He’s never really been… sentient? when I’ve had to use daycare in the past. Now he understands that Daddy goes to work (AKA The Place With The Muffins) and Mommy stays home with Wecky, and this new “Mommy work” with “pooters” (computers) means he doesn’t see either of his parents all day and he is not pleased.

I thought in some ways it’d be easier now that he’s older and not a helpless infant, but in many ways I am realizing it is FAR WORSE.

Day one, he started bawling “MOMMY DADDY! MOMMY DADDY!” when I picked him up, and it took several minutes to calm him down and reassure him that Mommy and Daddy didn’t leave forever, and Mommy was taking him home so we’d be there when Daddy got home. Day two, when I came to get him he was snotty and covered in tears and they said he did great up until the last ten-ish minutes, when several parents started showing up and he was looking around for his mommy and daddy and didn’t see them.

KNIFE, MEET HEART.

Plus, he doesn’t seem to nap very well there (maybe an hour, vs the two+ we get at home) so he comes home super cranky. They also don’t have daily sheets like I thought they would, the ones that say what he ate and when he napped and for how long. So when I get him in the afternoons, I do not have the faintest idea what he did all day and since he can’t talk super well, I can’t ask him what he did either. It just makes things that much harder than they need to be.

——

In addition to this, my paternal grandma passed away on Wednesday night, at the age of 87. She’s the one who taught me embroidery when I was ten, and always encouraged my craft projects. I have extremely fond memories of being ten or eleven years old, eating homemade bread with butter and jam at her kitchen table, while talking to her about life.

She always tried to get me to be less messy, telling me “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” She was the sort of lady who had her Christmas shopping finished in July, and never sent her Christmas cards out later than the first week of December. She handmade all of her grandchildren a Christmas ornament every year, so when we moved out and began our own lives, we’d have a whole collection of our own ornaments to use on our tree. She loved owls and hummingbirds.

This has been a hard week.

We had pizza, chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, and fruit salad with a watermelon carved like a Tyrannosaurus Rex! (I followed this tutorial.)

——

Wesley has been so funny and so crazy lately; I suppose it’s part of the territory when you’re two.

He’s started talking in more sentence-like ways, saying things like “Daddy make juice” or “Mommy play blocks” or “Sophie nap blanket.” He’s been calling himself “Wecky” for months, but now he does it if he wants something. Especially if we’re in the store. He just starts wailing “WECKYYYYYYY! WEEEEEEEEECKYYYYY!” which sounds like absolute nonsense to anybody but us.

I posted this on Twitter already, but the day after his birthday he found a leftover unused plate and said, “Plate! Mommy Rowie. Eat. Pizza! Happy birthday! Blow candle. Cupcake.” IT’S LIKE HE IS A REAL HUMAN, WITH MEMORIES. (“Rowie” (Roan) is his best friend, and he never calls Roan’s mom by her name – it’s always “Rowie Mommy.”)

This is a super belated post, but I wanted to acknowledge his birthday here for posterity. Happy birthday, Babby Weffles!

I feel like I’m in a weird place right now though, being a breastfeeding advocate who is not currently breastfeeding. Intellectually, I know it is totally possible to live in this space, but it feels weird to me nonetheless. I think my next steps are going to be researching how to improve Idaho’s breastfeeding laws! That way, even though I am not currently nursing a baby, I can still help out and support other mothers who are or who plan to.

I’m sad about a few things; namely, that I have no photos of us breastfeeding. NOTE TO PARENTS: take photos of this! Your wife/girlfriend/partner may not ever want to see them, but some of us would be really happy if we had them.

Also, you know how everybody says “nobody gets a gold medal for breastfeeding?” Sometimes I think that’s sad, because gold medals are awesome. So I made myself one.

(I used this tutorial. Mostly.)

Now that we’re done nursing, I took the opportunity to invest in some state-of-the-art non-nursing bras, and I am so very, very excited for them to come in the mail.

For instance, Kansas House legislators have approved a bill that legalizes discrimination against gays and lesbians. This is so morally reprehensible to me that I am finding it difficult to come up with something coherent to say about it.

Pauls gave an example to explain why she backs the bill, saying an employer should be allowed to fire a “cross dresser.”

So… what, a woman who wears pants? Seriously. This person is in favor of someone losing their job because they might not dress according to society’s gender norms.

For example, an employer could fire someone if they discovered the employee was gay. Or a landlord could kick a renter out of their home. The religious exemption extends past places of business to universities, where students or instructors could opt out of a school’s anti-discrimination policy.

It is absolutely NOT an employer’s business who an employee is in love with. It just isn’t. You just know the companies that would perpetrate this injustice would likely not fire the married employee having an affair with the new secretary. Because even though it’s adultery, it is not THE GAY so it’s okay. I just… Ugh. People are people. Who they love is nobody’s business but the parties involved. Legalizing discrimination hurts everyone.

——

Then there’s that whole Sandra Fluke thing.

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”
-source

Calling someone (ANYONE) a slut and a prostitute for requesting that heath insurance providers cover prescription medication is so, so far beyond the pale that I’m surprised there isn’t more outrage. What he said is in no way acceptable. (Plus, he didn’t even get her name right.)

His statement that she was “having so much sex” she couldn’t afford birth control and wants the government to pay for it is patently untrue – her testimony referred to a friend of hers who lost an ovary because despite needing contraception to treat her ovarian cysts, she couldn’t afford the medication. To continue on and say that, for requesting such a thing, she should be required to film her sexual activities for others’ enjoyment? I am nearly apoplectic.

“So the woman comes forth with this frankly hilarious claim that she’s having so much sex – and her buddies with her – that she can’t afford it,” Limbaugh continued. “And not one person says, did you ever think about maybe backing off the amount of sex that you have?”
-source

Rush, this is not how the pill works. You take one pill a day, regardless how much (or how little!) sex you are planning to engage in that day. You do not take a pill before every sexual encounter. Frankly, it shocks me that a man (who, due to his widely publicized prescription for Viagra and his multiple marriages, is presumably having sex with women) would not understand the mechanics of taking contraceptive pills.

Also, why should she have to back off on the amount of sex she has? Slut-shaming is also not okay.

——

Then, there’s all hoopla about required ultrasounds (often transvaginal) as part of a prerequisite for abortions. One such bill was recently withdrawn in Idaho (and you can bet your britches I wrote to my congressman about it).

“[...] What I was hoping that it would accomplish is that it would give the mother one more opportunity to see the baby before she made that decision. … I think the more information they have, the less likely they are to have an abortion.”
-Sen. Steve Vick, R-Dalton Gardens (a co-sponsor of the bill)

It’s infuriating to me that the men coming up with these bills think that women are not capable of recognizing when having a baby would be a bad decision for them. I know women who have had abortions, and it was the best decision for them at that point in their lives. Women do not blithely get abortions, and I’m not sure why there’s such a strong misconception that they do.

——

This is a slightly more minor issue, but despite its (comparatively) high breastfeeding rates, Idaho is one of only four states that does not have a law protecting public breastfeeding, other than to say you can be exempt from jury duty because of it.

Surprisingly, for how awful the breastfeeding rates in Mississippi are, they have a pretty comprehensive set of breastfeeding laws:

Law allows a mother to breast-feed her child in any location she is otherwise authorized to be and excuses breast-feeding mothers from jury duty. Also prohibits discrimination towards breast-feeding mothers who use lawful break time to express milk.
-source

I was shocked to discover this lack of protection for public breastfeeding in Idaho a couple of months ago and it’s been weighing on my mind ever since. Anybody have any ideas how I can get this ball rolling? Despite watching Schoolhouse Rock in my youth, I don’t have the faintest idea how to get a bill introduced.

——

All of this makes my heart hurt, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Meal planning.

(“Duh!” you are saying. I know.)

Apparently, all it took was me printing out a calendar and writing in dinner ideas. (I like the ones from Waterproof Paper, as they are full-page, free from ornamentation, and have spaces big enough to write in.) That way, if I know Thursday is “Stir Fry Night,” I can start the rice and chop veggies before Daniel gets home, so when he arrives all he has to do is throw the veggies in the wok for a few minutes.

It has revolutionized my life. For realz.

My problem was that it would get to be 5:15pm and I would start asking myself what I/we should make for dinner. If you are not already aware, this is a horrible time to plan dinner. I’m at least kind of hungry by then (I eat lunch at noon, usually) if not flat-out starving, I have no energy after taking care of Wesley all day, and I’m really bad at coming up with ideas for what to eat.

The meal plan solves all this! If I know what dinner will be, I can mentally prepare for prepping it instead of running out of steam by then, it makes Daniel less grouchy because he doesn’t have to come home from a long day of work and then spend forever making dinner, and we all sit around the table like a Real Family instead of scattering about the house with TV or the computer or a book.

I only plan about two weeks at a time, and stuff does get shifted around due to plans changing or too many leftovers or whatever, but it’s been a good system so far and I’m very pleased with it.

Some of our dinner ideas are: Spaghetti, stir fry, quinoa patties, “Moroccan food,” homemade pizza, and different soups.

So! If you are like me and have trouble thinking of things to make at dinnertime, spend about 15-20 minutes every two weeks to write down some dinner ideas, and you too can have a revolutionized life!