I am feeling much better.  Not grumpy anymore.  Just so you know.  It helps that Kristin is here visiting, the sun is shining, Avelyn has been semi-agreeable, and I wore a two-piece bathing suit at the beach today and didn’t give a rat’s patoot about my jiggly thighs and untamed bikini line (sorry, any onlookers).

I am, for the most part, a somewhat emotionally stable person.  Sure there have been bouts of PMS and random grumpiness in the past, but I like to think that I maintain a fairly level-headed existence.  Even while pregnant, when my hormones are out of whack and doing strange things to grow a baby, I still feel like myself.  Until this weekend, that is.  I don’t know what was up, but I was a MESS.  Perhaps it was the sweltering heat, the fatigue that comes with anemia (now that I know I’m anemic, I’m all, “I’m soooo tired….my blood has no irooooon!”), the official descent by our toddler into the Land of the Terrible Twos, marked by inexplicable tantrums and unjustified screaming, the fact that my hubby is working about 67 hours a day, the incident where Avelyn birthed a massive log in the tub and when she hopped out of the bathtub she slipped on the floor and bashed her chin on the edge of the toilet, thus splitting her chin open and soaking the floor with blood, the messy house I can’t seem to keep up with, or the cruel scale that tells me I’ve gained another two pounds and I’m pretty sure they have been added to my rippled thighs.

I had a few good cries over the course of the weekend and am feeling a little better today. I just hate it when I feel so terrible and I take it out on the people around me, the ones I love the most.  And I also hate that it’s so easy to focus on the negatives when, really, I am ridiculously privileged to be living the life I am.  There are millions of people wondering if they’ll get a next meal and here I am, griping about poop in the tub and cellulite.

I’m going to be fine.  More than fine, actually.  It just might take a day or two.

The refusal to nap continues and by the time four o’clock in the afternoon hits, both Avelyn and I have had about enough of the day.

She is a growly bear by the mid-afternoon but by then it’s too late to put her down for a rest, since that would bump her bedtime back and that’s a sacrifice I’m just not willing to make.

Only three more hours till bed.  Help me.

Remember this?  Well, I got a call from my doctor today and it turns out that my latest blood test reveals that I am anemic.  Time to start drinking a raunchy iron vitamin drink everyday and gnawing on a fistful of ground beef.  Yuck.  It’ll be interesting to see if the ice cravings diminish once my iron levels are back to normal.  Until then, I’ll keep on crunching.

A couple weeks ago Steve installed the air conditioners, those hulking, loud cubes of cool that perch on our window sills, in our master bedroom and in Avelyn’s nursery.  The first night we had them turned on I pulled out the baby monitor, which had been collecting dust under our bed, and told Steve, “I need to keep this on at night so I can hear if Avelyn needs me in the night.”

“You’re not turning that thing on again,” Steve stated.

“Why not?  It’s so loud with both a/c units going that I can’t hear her without it.  What if she has a bad dream or needs a bottle or something?” I countered.

“Amanda, you said you were going to stop giving her a bottle in the night when she turned one year old.  Now she’s nearly two and you’re still getting up at least 4 times a week to give her one.  Stop the madness!”  he explained.

He was right.  Avelyn no longer needs a bottle in the night, and it had simply become a habit for me to stumble out of bed in the wee hours of the morn and toss some milk into her crib to lull her back to sleep.  Some mornings her pajamas, crib sheet, and mattress liner would be soaked with pee from all the liquid I had given her in the night.  It was bad for her teeth and bad for my sleep requirements.  But then she’d sleep right through the night for a few days and I’d think, “This is it.  She’s finally doing it.  She is capable of making it through without a bottle.”  However, those spurts never lasted long and she’d be back to waking up and calling out, “Bottle!” at three a.m.

So.  In the past two weeks, since our air conditioners have been loudly whirring through the nights and I can’t hear Avelyn down the hallway in her room*, I have been sleeping peacefully and our daughter has been doing the same.  It took a few nights, and she did put up a protest, as the company who slept in our basement can attest to, but it’s been worth it.  She does not need a bottle, and I do need my sleep, especially with a new baby on the way.  There’s no way I could deal with the night time feeding demands of a newborn, peppered by wakings of my toddler.  So there you have it:  she sleeps through the night and sure, she might have cried about it, but I couldn’t hear the wailing, so it wasn’t as rough a process as I had anticipated.

*So you don’t think I’m completely negligent and heartless, I can hear Avelyn when she’s really crying, so it’s not like I couldn’t hear her if she were sick or hurt or in trouble.   The air conditioner simply provides enough white noise that I don’t hear her every move and whimper in the night.

This afternoon I was at the park and Avelyn was walking around with a bottle of milk dangling from her pursed lips.  There were other moms around and I felt the need to defend the reason that my giant toddler had a bottle on the jungle gym, but all I would have been able to say was, “I don’t normally give her a bottle in public, but she drank paint this morning and poison control suggested I give her as much milk as possible.”  See, kind of a lose-lose explanation.

Yep, Avelyn had her first sampling of paint today.  Steve wanted me to paint numbers on the orchard posts so he got a can of paint all open and mixed in the carport.  While I was upstairs getting dressed I assumed he was still downstairs, by the paint.  But when I walked outside I saw the driveway splattered with paint and a little girl whose face was covered, coughing, “Yucky!”

It didn’t look like she had actually ingested much paint and the inside of her mouth was fairly clean but I phoned Poison Control just to be safe.  Luckily it was a water-based paint and since she barely got any into her system I was told not to worry and to simply pump her full of as much milk as she’d take, so it would coat her stomach lining.

Kids.

I am a city slicker at heart.  I love shopping and sipping frappuccinos and strolling down a street wearing cute, yet uncomfortable, shoes.  But I got swept up off my feet almost seven years ago by a farmer and he has held me hostage on an apple orchard with a panoramic lake view ever since.  I love the property and the beauty of the land.  I just hate the work.  Manual labour makes me die a little inside.  And farming happens to involve a lot of manual labour.  I know Steve would love it if I strapped on some overalls and tossed Avelyn in a hiking backpack carrier so I could prune the apple trees all day.  But then I wouldn’t just die a little inside; I would die utterly and completely, and he knows it.  He has been gracious and understanding and has been supportive of my other jobs, knowing that I am much happier sitting behind an office desk, talking to people, designing desktop publications, and being a happy little administrative assistant.  And he also is supportive of my devotion to being a full-time mom now, even though he wishes that he were the one taking Avelyn to the park and the beach every day.

Basically, he’s a great man and a great farmer.  I wish I could be the hick of a wife he dreams of, but I wish that he liked to loiter in coffee shops and go to plays at the theater, so we’re both giving a little and taking a little.  Meaning, once every five years I pick and apple (and whine about it) and once every five years he takes me to a play (and whines about it).  It works, OK?

That being said, I sure do love to see Avelyn running through the rows of apples, happy to be a part of the farm.  She likes to help Steve in the orchard, she’ll gladly sit on the tractor for an hour, and she is happiest when she’s digging in the dirt of the land.

There’s hope for an heir, after all.

Last night we celebrated the third birthday of Camille, one of Avelyn’s favourite “big kid” friends.  The party was a hit and there were dozens of wild children running around the yard, inhaling potato chips, chasing balloons and smearing cake all over their shirts.  The highlight for Avelyn, however,  was the juice.  She’s not used to juice, straight up.  I usually water it down half and half for her so she’s not getting too much sugar in the day.  But when she saw that the juice boxes were just sitting in a cooler, and a cooler that was easily pried open by her grubby little hands, she went nuts.

(Anyone out there watch Arrested Development?  Think Buster Bluth, “We have unlimited juice?  This party is going to be off the hook!”)

The sugar rush set in and Avelyn plotted her next move.  Faces like this make me scared.

After three hours of non-stop juice, Avelyn started to crash.  (Did I mention that she has officially stopped napping?  I am dying.)  I tossed her in the truck and she fell asleep as soon as we hit the road.  She didn’t rouse when I carried her to her room, stripped off her dried and crusty juice-stained clothes and placed her in her crib.  She was down for the count.  I was certain she’d sleep in this morning, after such an eventful evening and the fact that she now burns through each day with no nap, but alas, at 6:15, there she was, hollering, “Mommeeee!” from her crib.  Must’ve been the juice.

The fiercest pregnancy craving I’ve had this time around is cold, loud, and, shockingly, calorie-free. It’s ice.

I have been crunching my way through a big bag every week. I eat it plain, with a spoon. I fill up a glass with cubes, then pour a little fruit juice over them and chew till my teeth are numb. I grind it up in the blender until it looks like snow and then make smoothies with it. I can’t stop the ice.

A few people have told me that craving ice is a sign that the body’s iron stores are low, which makes absolutely no sense to me. If my iron were low, wouldn’t I be craving a t-bone steak?

It’s just starting to get hot here and I have a feeling that my ice addiction will continue to prevail as I try to make it through the summer with another human growing in my body.

So, ice is where it’s at.  It turns out that cookies are also where it’s at. I figure since the ice is non-caloric, I gotta get them somewhere.

Toddler sweat mixed with sunscreen in the seams of her polka dot bikini.  “Hog-gogs” and watermelon and marshmallows for supper on a blanket in the sand.  Sprinting through the spray park with the big kids.  Sun-kissed shoulders and rosy cheeks.  Falling asleep in the truck on the ride home from the beach.

This is the life.