How NOT to interact with pregnant co-workers

I started with my company straight out of college and was lucky enough to land a great group of co-workers with whom I have a lot in common. There are a lot of women in my office who are pregnant and/or have young children, and we share stories and commiserate regularly.

Pregnancy in the workplace is not exactly uncommon anymore. Logic would dictate that when you work in an office with a large number of women in their mid-twenties to mid-forties, there will be a lot of pregnancies. For whatever reason, some of the men in our office can't seem to grasp that concept. Every time someone announces a pregnancy, the "there must be something in the water" joke gets repeated so many times that it's all I can do not to say, "Is the water what's causing all of you guys to gain weight and turn gray? Because it sure seems to be happening to a lot of you."

The lame jokes are only the beginning. Below is my list of "Things Not to Say to Pregnant Co-Workers", based on comments from people in my office (and appropriate responses in italics):

General Irritating Questions
1. Were you trying to get pregnant? No, we meant to have anal sex but accidentally stuck it in the wrong hole.

2. Are you excited? No, actually we're considering late-term abortion but decided to make the announcement anyway.

Weight Comments
3. Wow, you're so big for 4 months. You're looking pretty chunky yourself.

4. How much weight have you gained so far? 1 million pounds

5. Your dress is still long enough in the front, but it's getting short in the back. GFY

General Comments
6. (In response to pregnant woman saying she's getting big or not feeling well) It's going to get so much worse. Thanks for your insight, Dr. Douchebag.

7. (In response to pregnant woman mentioning the sex of her baby) It's not sex, it's gender. Sex is what you did to make the baby. But I thought you told me a few months ago that I got pregnant from drinking the water?! Have you been lying to me all this time?

8. You shouldn't be eating/drinking that while you're pregnant. GFY

And, one post-pregnancy one:

9. (First day back to work) Don't you miss your baby?

Grandpa Don't Do Diapers

My dad is great with Baby B. He loves taking him out, feeding him, walking him to sleep, and pretty much every other baby-related activity... except diaper changes. He's never really learned how to use our cloth diapers, so he he just avoids diaper changes altogether. Today, he was holding Baby B and commented that Baby B needed a diaper change. I had Danedeer #3 on my lap (yes, my 140 lb dog regularly sits on people's laps), so he said he would give it a try.

A couple minutes later, The Husband goes into Baby B's room where the diaper change is taking place and yells to me, "We need to give B a bath right now." I respond that I'll do it after he eats dinner, and The Husband says, "No, he needs one now... your dad used Clorox wipes on him."

It turns out that the cleaning lady, who came earlier today, had left a container of Clorox wipes on the changing table. My dad, not knowing what our normal wipe container looks like, used those to wipe my poor baby's butt.

I practically flew up the stairs and had Baby B in the shower in 10 seconds flat- both of us fully clothed. He's fine- the wipes were bleach free and he wasn't phased in the slightest. I need to have a talk with the cleaning lady about never leaving cleaning supplies out though.

And, here are a couple pictures. Sorry about the image quality- I took them with my phone.

This is Danedeer #3 (otherwise known as Triana, Nanana, and Chunks McGee) sleeping on the couch last night.
And here's my tough baby boy this afternoon. How can someone who's teething like crazy and has a slight fever and runny nose still be so good natured?

To Nag or Not to Nag...

After bickering with The Husband all of Monday night over insignificant things, I got to thinking: What would happen if I were totally, completely, perfectly nice? Is nagging my husband and getting frustrated when he doesn't do what I want serving a purpose, or is it just creating unnecessary stress?

So, while half-asleep on Monday night, I decided to try an experiment: one week of no nagging or complaining. Of course I didn't tell The Husband about the experiment, because that would taint the results. If I ask him to do something and it doesn't get done, I either 1) leave it alone and don't comment or 2) if it really needs to be done, do it myself and don't comment. If I ask him to do something and he says no, I don't argue or act upset.

Three days in, I have to admit I'm pleasantly surprised. It turns out that my husband doesn't actually need to be nagged and, if left alone, will eventually do what needs to be done without multiple reminders. For example: tonight after dinner, I had to take Baby B upstairs for a bath because he tends to wear more of his food than he eats. (and because of this, we feed him in just a diaper and bib so that he doesn't ruin his cute little outfits). We still had a bowl of ravioli on the table, and The Danedeers were on the prowl waiting for a chance to help themselves. I asked The Husband to clear the table so that the Danedeers didn't get the food. He responded, "Just put everything in the center so they can't get it."

On a normal night, I might have responded, "Can't you just do it really quickly?" On an angry night, I would have thrown a fit about how I have to do everything around the house and how he's too lazy to stop watching the game and clear the table. Tonight, I just said, "Okay" and moved the plates to the center of the table. A few minutes later, I heard him clearing the table and, when I came back downstairs after Baby B was in bed, not only was the table cleared but Baby B's dinner mess had been cleaned up as well.

The past few days have really reminded me to lighten up and stop insisting that everything happen on my schedule. For the most part, that just causes unnecessary stress. The Husband is a responsible man who does a great job of taking care of things around the house without being asked. He does most of our cooking, has all of the laundry done and the bottles and pump parts sterilized before I get home from work every day, and is much better about tidying up than I am. We're both really busy and have limited time together and with Baby B. If we let something slip every once in a while, it's not the end of the world.

Adventures in Childcare- Part 2

My last post on childcare talked about how we selected our first childcare provider, Jessica. The arrangement we set up was that Jessica would watch Baby B for 4 days per week at a flat rate of $40 per day. This seemed like a bargain to us since he was going to be the only child she watched besides her own son, but we weren't going to argue and figured that if the arrangement worked out we would give her a raise in a few months.

Before I get into what went wrong with this arrangement, I'll talk about what was good with it:

• Baby B got a lot of attention with Jessica. She was very doting, and he was always clean and happy when we picked him up.
• Her house was spotless.
• Her kids were very well-behaved, and her 3-year-old son was very gentle with Baby B.
• It was an easy transition for Baby B, since it wasn't too different of an environment than home.
• When her kids were sick, she would let us know so that we could keep Baby B home if we wanted to.
• Our arrangement was very flexible. We didn't have to pay her for days that we didn't use her.

So, what went wrong? Well, there were little things from the beginning that weren't ideal, but none of these would have been enough to make us switch childcare providers since no arrangement is going to be perfect. Some of these little things were:

• Driving. Since Jessica had to pick up her older child from school, she had to drive with Baby B. We were aware of this when we hired her, so it obviously wasn't too big of a concern for us. My only issue is that she would take the carseat base out of her car every weekend, so I was always concerned that it wasn't installed properly. Paranoid, I know, but he's my baby!
• Wasted breast milk. I think you have to be a working mother to understand how tough it is to exclusively breastfeed while working. The first month of getting into a routine and making sure you're pumping enough to keep up with what your baby is eating is going to be difficult no matter what. Having a childcare provider who would not work with me at all on this made the situation even more challenging. I asked Jessica to hold off on giving Baby B a bottle if possible for the 30 minutes before I picked him up. Obviously, I wasn't asking her to let him scream for a half hour, but if he was showing some early hunger signs I wanted her to give him a pacifier and distract him so that I could nurse him when I got there. I even got in the habit of calling her when I was leaving the office to remind her. However, it was a common occurrence for me to show up and find out that she had just defrosted a bottle of frozen milk. On quite of few of those occasions, Baby B wasn't even hungry and, since defrosted milk has to be used within an hour, my "precious milk" (as The Husband calls it) would go to waste.
• Money. When I started back to work, my plan was to go back to work 20 hours per week (8 hours Tuesday and Thursday, 4 hours Wednesday) for the first two weeks and then 30 hours per week (Monday through Thursday) after that. Two weeks into the job (on the evening after my first Monday back at work), Jessica called me in the evening to let me know that she could no longer watch Baby B for $40/day and would need a $10/day raise in order to continue watching him. Her justification is that $40/day was not a fair rate and that she had been getting offers to clean houses and could make more money doing that. At this point, we thought she was doing a good job with the baby and that the level of care he was receiving was worth the extra money. My issue with this is that it is completely unprofessional to demand a 20% raise two weeks into a job. It's not like we were leaving Baby B with her for more hours than agreed upon (if anything, we were leaving him for less hours than we originally discussed).
  

Now, here are the big things that ultimately caused us to switch childcare providers:

• Reliability. In the 40 days total that Jessica was supposed to watch Baby B, she couldn't watch him on 10 due to personal issues (mostly her own children's illnesses). First, her younger son had a bad cold. Then a couple weeks later, she called me two hours after I dropped off Baby B freaking out because she discovered that her older son had lice. Then, she got a sinus infection and called in sick every day for a week (actually, on the last day of the week she didn't even bother to call). I realize that, for most people, this alone would be reason to switch childcare providers, but I'm fortunate enough to have a very flexible job, a wonderful best friend who works nights, and parents who live nearby and also have flexible jobs. Still, having constant childcare issues made it hard to get my billable hours in, and I was worried that if this pattern continued my boss would get irritated and the quality of my work would be affected.
  
• Unwillingness to follow our instructions. Ultimately, The Husband and I decided to switch childcare providers because Jessica refused to follow our instructions on what we consider to be a big thing- safe sleeping. When Baby B started with Jessica, he was 2 1/2 months old and was still sleeping in his Pack n Play in our room. We bought the same Pack n Play and sheet for Jessica's house that we had at home. But, a month in, Jessica mentioned in casual conversation that she was putting Baby B to sleep on her son's bed instead of in his Pack n Play. I was not okay with this- I thought it was a safety issue since Baby B was already rolling over at this point and I wanted Baby B to develop healthy sleep habits. I asked her to start putting him in his Pack n Play for naps, and she simply would not do it. One day in, she started complaining that he wouldn't sleep in his Pack n Play and that she had to put him back on her son's bed. Three days in, she complained that, "Baby B wouldn't nap for long in his Pack n Play and that this was taking away from her time with her son" and said she let him sleep on the couch instead. At this point, we started looking for new childcare providers. This coincided with her full week of calling in sick, which accelerated our search.

That's all for tonight. The Husband and I are actually going out for once to grab a beer and shoot some pool (a VERY rare occurrence). Next time, I'll talk about our childcare search the second time around and our new childcare provider.

Happy Mother's Day!

My first "official" Mother's Day was pretty fabulous. I say "official" because The Husband and I had a little disagreement last year about whether Mother's Day counts when you're pregnant. After three months of morning sickness and total exhaustion, I thought I deserved a little acknowledgment. He disagreed. He went all out this year though because he knew he would be committing himself to a year of celibacy if he didn't because he's a good husband.

The only blip in an otherwise perfect day was having to see Woman Hitler (otherwise known as my mother-in-law). In case the nickname didn't give it away, Woman Hitler and I aren't exactly the best of friends. In the beginning I really tried to have a relationship with her because, despite The Husband's warnings, I figured that the woman who raised my husband and his nice, normal siblings couldn't be that crazy. I was very, very wrong on that one. Now I'm nice to her for The Husband and Baby B's sake, but it's painful.

Since Woman Hitler despises my mother and everything she stands for (successful working woman), I did manage to entertain myself by making a few subtle comments that I knew would get under her skin, such as, "Oh, I think Baby B looks a lot like my mom" and "my mom takes Baby B out running with her all the time and people think she's his mother".

Adventures in Childcare- Part 1

As soon as I found out I was pregnant with Baby B, I started worrying about childcare. I looked at a couple of the centers near us and quickly ruled most of them out due to cost and lack of flexibility. I then talked to a couple of home daycare providers recommended by friends of friends, but none of them had openings or could say whether they would when we would need childcare. I put Baby B on the waitlist for the one daycare center that met our criteria in May 2008- before we even knew that he was a boy.

Fast forward to December. The end of my maternity leave was rapidly approaching, and The Husband and I still had no idea what we doing about childcare. At that point, I started looking at the childcare provider ads on craigslist. My only previous experience with craigslist had landed The Husband and I a prostitute for a roommate (more on that some other time), but apparently I'm not very good at learning from my mistakes.

When I first started looking for childcare, my ideal daycare ad would have looked something like this:

"Loving and experienced childcare provider who will treat your child like her own. Very small home daycare will accept only one infant so that your baby can have constant attention. Part time accepted"

I responded to some ads and interviewed several people. The first home daycare was in a trailer that reeked of cat piss.. for a bargain price of $250/week. I though The Husband (who never went to daycare as a child and was therefore skeptical about it) was going to quit his job and become a stay at home dad after seeing that place. The next couple weren't bad but weren't particularly impressive either- both stay at home moms running small unlicensed home daycares. We finally found one that at the time sounded perfect to us: a stay at home mom looking to take in one child in addition to her own children (ages 3 and 8). We liked her and her husband, she lived very close to us, and her references and background checked out. So, we hired her.

I'm going to have to continue this tomorrow, since it's time for me to get some sleep in anticipation of the Mother's Day breakfast in bed that The Husband better be preparing for me tomorrow morning.

Multi-tasking at its finest

So... why am I blogging? Well, it sounded like a good way to keep myself occupied/awake while I pump tonight. Baby B seems to have inherited his father's chugging ability, because he goes through way more milk at daycare than I can possibly pump during my workday. Every weeknight I pump an extra bottle right before I go to sleep to make up the difference. So, pumping and typing it is. Don't expect any kind of live webcam feed on here.

I haven't blogged since college (back when I actually had funny stuff to write about), so I'm feeling a little awkward right now. I guess I'll start with an explanation of my blog name. The "baby" is our wonderful little Baby B, born October 24, 2008:


And the beasts? Our three Great Danes, affectionately referred to as The Danedeers: