Tuesday, August 2, 2011

In which we take on a yard sale and our first night leaving Milo with a babysitter

Whoa the last two days have been busy. Yesterday, we had to get up on the early side to get ready for the big yard sale. I'm starting to get used to the fact that I have to build in an extra hour or so of getting ready time for feeding Milo and getting waylaid by Milo-related incidents. The yard sale was supposed to start at 11 so that meant getting up at 8:30 or so. After not so much sleep, because Milo still wouldn't take a bottle.

It was pretty stressful getting everything ready and out for the sale, especially since we hadn't gone through the stuff in the basement ahead of time. Luckily, Milo slept the whole time we were getting ready and since we have that awesome (priceless!) video monitor, we left him upstairs, sleeping peacefully in air conditioning. The first family that stopped by bought all of the Ikea furniture at once, which was pretty exciting because it meant we wouldn't have to cart it all back inside again! All in all, we made over $200 at the sale which wasn't a bad take for 5 hours. But the real prize is that my friend arranged for someone to come pick up all of the remainders on Wednesday morning, so we get rid of all the stuff we didn't sell too. Yay! So much more room and less clutter in our storage now. It was super hard to box up the books that didn't sell. I don't really want to just give them away but I forced myself. Agh. I love those books and feel such a sense of loss. I'm sort of grieving this dream I have of a future house with a library lined with all of my books...which clearly won't ever happen since a) we're living in a tiny apartment on campus and not house shopping any time soon and b) I will have given away all of my books by then.

Anyway, during a Milo-feeding break, I went to make a reservation at the new restaurant we were going to try for our anniversary dinner but it turned out to be closed on Sundays. And so did the next restaurant we tried. WTF? What kind of business plan is that? So we changed our plans to a local restaurant we know we like that is close to the local movie theatre...that way we'd be gone from Milo less time, since this was our first time leaving him with someone else.

So the yard sale ended at 4, and I finished packing up the remainders by 5, which left a half hour for us both to get showered and ready for the Big Night Out. Our friend Erin was babysitting, and she's the best sort of babysitter for new parents...very nonchalant about the prospect that Milo might not take a bottle and might scream his head off for hours. Very reassuring.

Michael and I had a fantastic dinner (complete with a buzz-garnering mango vanilla drink thingie) and dessert and then headed over to watch Harry Potter. I texted Erin in case we needed to come home and feed Milo but she sent me a little picture of him smiling and said all was well, so off we went. Only when we got there, it turned out we were half an hour early for the movie, thanks to the wrong time being posted online. I figured that might mean we'd have to call off the movie plans, but Erin was unfazed (or at least pretended to be--god bless her).  So we got to watch the whole movie, which was longer than two hours. So it had been about 5 hours since Milo had eaten by the time we came home and we expected to come home to wailing. But no, Milo seemed fine. Erin was bouncing him on the exercise ball and he was pretty subdued and sleepy. Turns out he wouldn't take the bottle from her either, even though he should have been pretty hungry.

But I think he's at a weight/stage where he can suddenly go longer without eating, because we fed him around 11 and put him to bed. I followed at around midnight. I woke up around 6:15 and realized he had never woken up to eat. I was so surprised that I checked to make sure he was still breathing. (He was.) I figured since I was awake, I'd try to pull off a "dream feed" which is when you basically feed the baby while he's sleeping in order to extend his sleep. It totally worked and bought us another 3 hours. Which means I got about 8 hours of sleep last night! WOOO HOOO. I'm PRAYING we've gotten over a hump and this wasn't a one time fluke. I can totally manage one feeding a night.

Today we had to get up early again to call the doctor, because Milo has been having weird tearing and eye issues and we thought he might have pinkeye since someone on campus had it recently. This was my first time calling the nurse line and it took just under two hours for them to call back. I guess that's not too too bad. The nurse reassured me that it was really a clogged tear duct and very common and it didn't need any special treatment. phew.

Then we had to clean the house because I had a college counselee coming for a meeting.  Milo sat in his bouncer and played on his activity gym and had tummy time while I cleaned. And when he fussed, I picked him up and danced with him to my cleaning playlist. So it was pretty fun, for cleaning. And, get this: I stopped at "good enough." I still had to actually work on her college counseling, after all! The meeting went well, and Milo made it until the end before he started to wake up. Then, I fed him again and when he finally started getting sleepy, I debated getting up to clean more because we had friends coming over to dinner. But I decided instead to just stay there with Milo sleeping on me. I don't want to waste cozy time with him. Of course then I got really sleepy and was just falling asleep when my alarm went off. A few minutes later, our doorbell rang.

This friend is one I met when I was studying at Harvard and we really connected. We used to have these long, thought-provoking, genuine talks and we were in several classes together. We didn't keep in touch as well as I had hoped afterward, but she and her husband came to our wedding and I was so glad they did. Then a bunch more time passed before I asked her if she'd go to a Jodi Picoult reading with me and I was so happy she agreed to. Then, a bunch more time passed and I invited her to my baby shower because I missed her and wanted to reconnect.  But it turns out she was really sick and couldn't come. So I was super excited when she emailed me last week and said she and her husband wanted to come meet Milo and bring us Thai dinner. It turns out they are expecting their first child in October, so Michael and I got to have a little bit of fun pretending we knew a little something about the beginning of parenthood. ;-)  Oh! And she made Milo a beautiful baby blanket. He is such a lucky little guy to have so many people spend time making things for him!

So today just FLEW by, but in a nice way. Tomorrow we need to leave the house by 10:30 at the latest in order to meet the moms for lunch before our 4th group meeting. And then we need to get the stuff ready for the donation pick up and then we need to PACK for our vacation! YAY. Well, yay about getting there. Not so yay about packing and driving there. And the fact that I'll probably need to do laundry before I can pack. And the fact that it's hard to know what to bring for Milo. But I'm pretty psyched to have a little vacation with him. It will be hard to not bring work though because I haven't finished the college counseling that I told families I would do before I left. sigh. It's hard to know whether I'd feel better completely ignoring it and having a work free zone or if I'd feel better picking away at it.  Mostly I want to sleep and read and walk around the cute little Church Street Marketplace.

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