life and other complications

they follow up with these people on May 22nd, right?

via www.msnbc.msn.com

emotional rollercoaster (via a Honda ad campaign)

so, here's the thing-- i'm in the shower this morning and, as does happen, a song pops into my head:

holiday, oh holiday and the best one of the year

then i think to myself, shoot-- this isn't a song; it's a CAR COMMERCIAL. i'm singing a CAR COMMERCIAL.
ok, i'm that person, the one the ad agency is trying to reach. i'm *that* demographic now.
so i decide to do some research to find out for *which* vehicle am i clearly the well-suited demographic. (please not a Ford Focus or, like, a minivan)

and i find this:

Vampire Weekend Soundtracks Hilfiger, Honda “Holiday” Ads - Stereogum

redemption!! i'm not humming a stupid car jingle in the shower. this is a real, actual song that i have stuck in my head. and Vampire Weekend? way more street cred than some ad jingle guy. ok, awesome.

except, except--

i *didn't know* it was a real song, right? i wasn't out listening to actual music and that's how it got into my head, which how things used to go down. i used to be someone who got mad at bands for selling out and pandering to the masses, so it kind of sucks to realize that now?

I'M THE MASSES. it's like my soylent green moment.

Edition removes N-word from Mark Twain classics - Books - booknews - TODAYshow.com

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

via today.msnbc.msn.com

really? am i just kind of a dick in thinking one ought not to fancy themselves more capable of writing Mark Twain's novel than, say, Mark Twain was?

Ghetto cooking with Emily

Low brow enchiladas-- night two of my 2011 resolution: cook dinner five nights a week...

my other resolution? start blogging again. (i'm not going even to pretend to legitimize my "lose weight" resolution because, yeah, unlikely.)

but, really, on the cooking thing. i'm committed to it. so last night i made an extra pork tenderloin, just for this prupose-- to shred, toss with salsa and chili, tear up some tortillas and toss in and then top with some broken up Tostitos and cheddar cheese. gourmet food it wasn't. but cooked by me? why yes it was. short ribs cooked all day today in red wine/broth/et al. in order to have them ready for tomorrow night's dinner. if i can figure out Thursday and Friday dinners then i'll at least have kept my resolution for a week, which is no small feat and, also, probably a record for me.

Justin v. Food

watching a *little* too much Adam Richman has clearly gotten to Justin, as this is what just arrived in my mailbox:

accompanied (in all seriousness) by these brave words:

"I think I could do this if I didn’t have any white bread and chose the sides carefully.  Might be more if I saw it but thinking about 1/2 lb of 4 things doesn’t really scare me much."

now, i love Hill Country as much (ok, more) than your average person, yet i still can't decide if i'm more impressed or disgusted that Justin thinks this is A) something he ought to do, and B) something he is truly capable of doing. and, even worse, i can't really figure out if i should be grossed out at myself for being a little bit jealous of him if he actually follows through. and that i have been actually sitting here thinking about a strategy to accomplish this (the challenge is to eat it all in under an hour; if you do so, it's free. if not, you're out $65). i'm thinking the lean brisket could be a real sticking point-- ok, see? this is clearly an endeavor that Jenny Craig would *not* endorse and, even if Adam Richman is way cooler than JC, i'm meant to be on a beach in two weeks, so i need to focus up and keep my nose clean. (with a furlough for Superbowl Sunday, mais oui).

Goodnight, Sleep Tight,

Don't let the little bedbugs bite.

If they bite, squeeeeeeeze them tight--

They won't bite tomorrow night.

For some reason, this is the song we sing to the Bear every night when we put him to bed. As EJP pointed out to us, whoever wrote that song clearly does not know a lot about getting rid of bedbugs. (I hear the only way to get rid of those suckers is to burn them!) 

So, besides teaching our child ineffectual pest removal techniques, we are sure to keep the same bedtime routine each night.  This is to ensure that the little guy continues to be lazy a great sleeper, just like his mommy. And, honestly? It works! (Well, so far anyway). I entirely credit the book The Sleepeasy Solution, lent to us by friends when I found the Weissbluth and Ferber books to be too textbooky (and, if you know me, you know that textbooks were never exactly my favorite things to read. or things i read at all, if I'm being truthful). From what I can gather, all three advocate the same technique: cry it out (known in mom circles as CIO). It's just that the Sleepeasy book gets right down to the how-to and give great sample timelines and has downloadable charts and other things to make you think there's a method to it all. Which, importantly, gives you* something to keep you busy when your baby is *screaming* in his crib as you ignore his wail.

For us, CIO started right when the baby turned four months old. J was completely against unprepared for this endeavor, which he considered to be unbearably mean. But being home with the baby all day, I knew that he was simply not getting enough good sleep.  He had been a five/six/seven hour sleeper when he was younger, but had steadily been decreasing his sleep intervals and increasing the time he'd stay awake in between. It was *not* cool. The happiest baby on the block (also a decent help in the early days of Bear) was becoming a bit of a crankypants. And, as I tell the baby when it happens, there's nothing cool about a little boy who whines. So onto sleep training-- with a lot of help/encouragement from our neighbor, who'd just sleep trained her son, we put him down the first night after a routine of bath, bottle, book, bed.

Now, up to this point, putting the baby to bed involved feeding or nursing the baby to sleep and then, like a high stakes game of Jenga, trying to place him in the crib and extricate one's arms without waking the baby. He had *zero* ability to self-soothe to sleep. With sleep training, we now had to do the opposite-- be sure to keep the baby 100% awake, albeit drowsy, until it was time to put him down and then leave him in the crib to put himself to sleep. We used white noise in the room too, so that he'd start to associate that noise with sleep time (and also to block out the ambient noise in the apartment, such as me shouting at J to come watch Little Miss Perfect or Toddlers and Tiaras with me NOW!) And, then starts the hard part.

Listening to the baby cry and cry and cry, and get the hiccups from crying, and then cry some more, while he waits for you to come back in and soothe him to sleep. With the Sleepeasy book, we were allowed to go back in at set, increasing intervals and let the Bear know that we were there, we loved him and all was ok. But we could not pick him up or hold him. (Then if he woke in the middle of the night, repeat the same process.) And then, you know, just keep yourself busy in the meantime, watch tv, read a book, just hang out, oblivious to the fact that your child is screaming bloody murder in the next room (since we could clearly hear him during all this, I took the liberty of shutting off the sound on the baby monitor because, in case you thought otherwise, screaming baby in stereo is actually horrible to listen to).

 Another technique you'll be advised to employ, if you're a mom, is to "take a walk outside and let the dad stay with him, if you feel like you're compelled to go into the baby's room and pick him up." These people are unaware of my husband, Tenderheart Bear, who--immediately upon my exit from the apartment--would have that crying baby out of the crib, being held and, more importantly, having his crying behavior reinforced with the reward of getting picked up.

Well, the first night, the initial crying lasted (on and off) for an hour and forty minutes. There were also one or two wakeups during the night, one lasting over an hour. The next he cried less but still woke a couple of times. The third night? He cried for less than twenty minutes. And by the fourth night he was going down with only a tiny fuss and sleeping through the night with, also, only a short-lived fuss here and there that lasted for so short a time, we I didn't even need to go into his room to do the "it's ok, baby" interval training. 

And after a week, he was sleeping from 7:30pm or so until 8am every night. No wakeups. Moreover, he was (and is) wayyyyyyyyy more pleasant to be around and more pleased with everything he does. If I could marry the Sleepeasy Solution, I would so do so. (And I can't thank Danielle and Dan enough for putting that book in our hands!) That's right, that baby's sleep is tiiiiiiiiight.

---

* That's the general "you", by the way.  My heart of stone allowed me to get through the CIO nights without much trouble; just a little guilt born of haters who told me what I was doing was heartless. Bourbon got J through it, and me sending him out on various errands during prime cry-time also helped.

Sleepless nights

If you had to guess which one of these three is keeping me up at night, you might guess that it's the baby. You'd be wrong. It's solitaire and the internet. Yeah, he's an easy culprit as babies are usually the evil forces behind new mom sleep deprivation. But my "high sleep needs" (read: lazy) baby is blameless. That boy's been down since 7:30pm and I don't plan on hearing from him until 8/8:15am.

And yet I'm up and, for some reason, finding it incredibly important to up my winning percentage on an iPhone solitaire game. Am I officially too old to use FML unironically? Whatever-- FML!

my thoughts on Ke$ha

she is clearly the love child of L'Trimm and, maybe also, with a touch of JJ Fad, though that may be giving Ke$ha way too lofty of a compliment because, seriously? the girl is kind of not a great singer. i give you, Tik Tok:

and the Cars That Go Boom:

if i knew how to do it, i would do a mash-up, which seems to be popular with the kids these days. (or so Glee would have me think, like *every* single episode).

fueled by bacon

if i'm going to start this up again, there's no better way to get me going than wonderful, magical bacon. and, a month or so ago, i found out that my microwave has a bacon setting. what's better than that?

but, alas, no bacon for me. for the time being anyway. even though, last month, i discovered bacon donuts (!) with a maple glaze at girls' brunch. if i tell you i haven't thought of them everyday since, i would be lying.

that's because my post-pregnancy ass is trying to lose the "Jenny Twenty", which, apparently, they don't call it anymore over at Jenny Craig, where i have signed up to diet hardcore. and the whole disappearance of the Jenny Twenty ad campaign? totally ok with me. because i have to lose more like the Jenny Forty. not as rhyme-y, but way more accurate.

here's the sad part-- it's *not* baby weight. see, i lost the baby weight (all 25 pounds of it) within a few months of the baby bear's arrival. butt but prior to getting knocked up, yours truly gained a ton of post-knee surgery weight. awesome! the Jenny food is great but there's so very little of it. to keep myself from eating, i'll just share with the world (or any of my remaining readers) my consumerist thoughts on all i have procured (and all i've considered heavily and passed on) in my latest endeavor of spoiling my child ridiculously and ensuring i will need to move to a larger apartment in no time at all. i mean, why would you *not* want to follow in my footsteps?

so, yeah, other than a diary of how i (don't) eat and how i shop, not really sure where this blog will take me, but i'm giving it a rebirth.

i can see clearly now

because i finally got new glasses. thankfully so, because "you'll need to see well with that little one on the way!" or so sayeth the lady at the glasses store today.  notably, because this is the first time i've been called out as pregnant by someone who didn't know i was pregnant*.  all based on the (rapidly expanding) belly. so, yeah, i guess i have moved on from the looks like i ate too much pizza stage and am onto, there's a baby in that there thing stage. while it's comforting that i won't need to borrow Mrs. A's awesome shirt (previously noted):

since, apparently, there's no longer any confusion that i am indeed fat with child (ok, being honest, also fat with last night's pizza. ok, *always* fat with pizza).

the child-inside-of-me concept is wholly bizarre and, really, not unreminiscent of Alien, tired though that comparison may be.

so i press on, shop-shop-shopping my way to motherhood. yesterday was eat *and* shop in a day's work, with Union Square Cafe lunch followed by baby shopping at Schneider's. lunch was with my mom, Joan and the-also-pregnant Liz (not *my* CaliSister Liz, but the Liz i used to baby sit and who's due about six weeks before i am), and was delicious and very eventful as a man at a nearby table had an attack of sorts and had to be taken away by ambulance. he seemed to be ok by the time he was carted off, though, FYI, that was a full *twenty* minutes after people called 911. i'm not any expert on how these things should work, but i kind of think that twenty minutes is an awfully slow response time. especially when USC is a hop, skip and a jump from both St. Vincent's and Beth Israel hospitals. i promptly advised my mom et al. that, should i ever require emergency intervention, hail me a cab and get me on my way... the waiting *is* the hardest part. especially when you're in and out of consciousness as this guy was.

then it was onto Schneider's (with a brief stopover at Anthropologie) where i visited strollers as per my usual. i cannot, for the life of me, choose a stroller. i'm enamored of this one:

but am hearing that it might be a bit of a pain in the ass to fold and get into and out of the car. so, at least twice weekly, i visit this (the Stokke Xplory), the Bugaboo Cameleon and various other strollers in the hopes i can come to a conclusion before the baby is A) born and B) walking. more on the what-should-i-buy struggle to come. be so excited.

---

* though, notably, back in November before i was out of the pregnancy closet, an older relative cheerfully asked me "how's your pregnancy treating you?", clearly confusing me with Jomama, who was very preg at the time. now she's done with that though as the baby (all 10 lbs of her) has arrived.