the squibix family blog

As for Leah Archibald, I watched that whole video waiting for that baby to give me stock tips like in that Super Bowl commercial, but...nothing. What a slacker that tyke is.

Also, the crackhead took everything except the damn dog, who kept parading through the shot.

wishiwasmerckx my friend, the damn dog is a feature, not a bug :)

Video embedded for those too lazy to visit the other blog:

Rascal is alternately referred to as Rassy, Bassy, Bass-Bass, Boosicle, Puppy, Pups, and "The Dog" as in "Daaaaaannnnnnnyyyyy? I'm lying in bed, can you take out the Dog?"

The jury is still out on the most appropriate nick-name for our child, or as we like to call him, Harvester, Harveysons, H-sons, or "The Baby." Grandma mostly calls him Harvey, or sometimes Harve, the latter of which always gives me a chill because Harve was what everyone called my grandfather. I mean it makes sense since we did name the baby after that guy, but still. I hear "Harve, don't touch the poop!" and I imagine that it's Mr. Bernstein up there getting his diaper changed. Which by the way he would have loved if the changer was cute enough.

All this name calling makes me think about my own nom-de-mom, and what I'll be called in the coming years. Will it be Mom? Mother? Momma? Mommy? Ma?

Me, I prefer momma, but these days I'll take anything that isn't "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

That's right. Over three thousand people this week listened to me whine out the words "Hi bikesnob! This is Leah at squibix dot net, and Harvey at squibix dot net..."

You'd think that would turn into some traffic for our blog, wouldn't you?

Well you might, and you may still think that. I have no idea. I've been long mentioning to Dan that we should set up google analytics for our site, and we finally did it this week! A day after the Bike Snob Nod. Can someone please shut the barn door? it's freezing in here!

In other words, we have no historical comparison to say whether we're doing better this week than last week. But even so, the numbers aren't... well... let's just say they're a jumping off platform if we hope to get nominated for a Bloggy ourselves next year. Yesterday we had a whole 59 visits to our site. 48 from direct traffic, 8 from vimeo, 1 from facebook, and 1 from factinis and factomelettes (hi guys! We love you!), and one from google. And that person was searching for "squibix." I can has SEO please?

So in conclusion, our state the union may not be catastrof***ed, but there's a ways to go. But we'll make it one of these days. The internet is the new Broadway! And I want to be a part of it!

"But it's already on a video hosting channel," I say. "We use Vimeo."
"Yeah but people would see it if it were on YouTube."
"Mom, it's not like releasing a product launch to MSNBC. It's a baby - pet video. There are a hundred million of them on YouTube. Besides, Vimeo is classier."
"Whatever. They all said it's good enough to be on YouTube..."

Can someone please print her out a bumper sticker that reads "My child got three thousand hits on Vimeo"? I think that would make her feel a lot better.

Anyway, as I was saying, Harvey has been sleeping poorly as of late. A few months ago, which in sleep deprivation time reads like several hundred million years, Harvey was doing great with an eight-hour stretch followed by two quick wake-ups two hours apart. Life was good.

But then Harvey started pushing his bedtime later and later, and his first wake-up earlier and earlier, and before we knew it we were up every two hours every night as if we had a two-month-old.

We put him to bet at seven and he's up at nine. Then eleven. Then at one, three, five... any hour that isn't divisible by two. Every time he wants milk, and every other time I make him endure a diaper change. To save any semblance of parental functionality in the household, Dan has been sleeping on the couch downstairs. He still wakes up when the baby cries, so the situation is far from ideal, but the alternative is worse. If Dan and I are both in the bed with divergent opinions about what to do with a screaming baby, then it quickly dissolves into fisticuffs.

Before you offer your suggestions, here's what we've tried. We nailed down our evening routine so that every night we feed him, bathe him, have quiet down-time and then nursing. After that, Dan rocks Harvey to sleep while he screams at the top of his lungs. Harvey that is, not Dan. Dan is patiently singing in the face of the harshest critic he has ever seen.

So Harvey's got a belly-full of food, he's clean and relaxed, and he's at the break-down point of tired. He finally falls asleep, but it still won't carry him through to the am. What gives? People have suggested tooth troubles, but he's not fussy during the day! Today grandma suggested that it might be constipation, because the only time in a month that he slept six hours straight was when he did so in a pile of his own feces. I say terrible coincidence, not causality. After all, it's not like he wakes up and poops a storm. In fact, he doesn't usually make number two at all until the afternoon. And he's a happy boy all morning. He should be - he gets to be awake!

So I open it up to your wisdom, internet. Any ideas on saving our marriage and getting the little guy to sleep? Other than the classic T&T concoction? Time and Tylenol? I'll hear your suggestions in the comments.

A certain childcare provider in our stable of helpful baby watchers has a real "thing" about the cold issue, especially as it pertains to the little space between the baby's socks and his pants when he moves around. You see, as he moves sometimes the pants ride up and SKIN IS EXPOSED!!! (As if were were in the arctic tundra and that skin might instantly frost-bight in the 63 degree air inside our house.) So to save the baby from certain amputation this childcare provider pulls up his socks as far as they can go, up onto his calfs, and then the crisis is averted. No frost-bight praise God.

I, on the other hand, am a person who HATES the feel of constricting socks. Why don't you just pour cement around my feet and drop me in the river?!!! So when this childcare provider does the thing with the socks, I point out that the top of the socks make a line on his skin, and clearly this is an indication that they are cutting off his circulation, and this will positively kill his potential for future success in the Russian Ballet.

They need those calf muscles. Look at Barishnakov.

Suffice it to say there there have been spats over this issue the sock height issue. Still, I was surprised the other day to hear my reasons reinterpreted in the following fashion:

"Your mother doesn't like it when I pull up your socks" I heard her say to the baby, "because she thinks it looks faggoty."

WOAH WOAH WOAH!

SAYS WHAT NOW???

"How could you possibly ever think that was even close to anything I ever said in my life ever???" I stammered out, my head spinning into another dimension.

"What? I don't want his legs to be cold, but you said it looked bad!"

"Cuts. Off. Circulation. Not.... Looks.... F-Word." (here I was hyperventilating, so I couldn't get the words out so well.)

Not to say that I'm an immaculately non-judgmental human being. I have made one or two or several hundred thousand off-color remarks in my day. But here was a clear example of this woman I trust NOT LISTENING WHILE I GIVE SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS REGARDING THE HEALTH OF MY BABY! No, just kidding, I was mad because I'm not a bigot.

I do hope that in the new millennia certain words slip our of use from our collective vocabulary entirely. I'm thinking of you, N-word. And you, C-word. And you, faggoty. Not even for knee socks.

So I've been much heartened by Theresa's comments which somewhat support my own budding child-rearing philosophy. It goes something like this: "Meh! He'll figure it out. He can't be a baby forever!"

Wait for my new book on the subject, titled "Typing is hard - 40 doodles on laissez-faire parenting."

In keeping with that do-nothing-and-see-results vein, there have been some good developments over the weekend. On Friday we all slept in the bed together and Harvey slumbered beautifully with only two wake-ups! On Saturday night he did the same! The key may have been in the good advice, or in the prayer of some friends (Thanks Bridget!) or in the fact that we got him exponentially more stimulation on Friday and Saturday than he normally gets. Oh, so you're saying that you want to engage with other humans on a regular basis? Who don't share your genetic material? We just might have to go out with friends more then Harvey. It's a price I'm willing to pay.

So now the baby is asleep in the middle of the bed, and we'll see how the night goes. Although Dan has just informed me he'll be sleeping downstairs because the baby has passed his OVERstimulation limit from superbowl with grandma, and is on a wake-up hair trigger. Well, I didn't say the system was perfect, but we're working on it. I'm summarizing the results for you in my next article titled, "A year of birth-control: how to give your child the attention he needs for 365 nights." Coming soon to Parenting Magazine whenever I stay awake long enough to type it.

For those of you too busy to watch a 30-second spot (what are you doing reading our blog, anyway?) this ad is the story of a budding cross-cultural relationship told from the point of view of the young man's search strings. He studies abroad in Paris, he tries to impress a cute girl, things work out, and soon he's googling jobs in Paris. Then churches. Then the empty search box comes up, and there's a beat-long pause, and then he googles "How to assemble a crib."

Yes, I got misty-eyed. At a commercial. Something that hasn't happened since bobo.*

Okay, so I did get an MBA in marketing, so I can readily imagine the meeting between the brand managers and the ad agency. "Show them how Google enables your life. No! How Google IS your life! Google knows what you're thinking! Google's like God! You can't live without Google! We want people's DNA to shit Google!"

But I can't go down this road (even though I think it's completely hilarious to imagine someone saying "We want people's DNA to shit Google!") I simply love this ad. It sums up everything I love about the internet. That it's like real life but in the future. The future is awesome, people. It's awesome living in the future.

*Sniff! He got a new bobo!!!!

For those of you who didn't grow up in Lexington, lemme just tell you that Dan and I attended a very weird public high school. It might be the high school itself (built above an Indian burial ground?) or the breed of rich intellectuals who tend to inhabit our hometown. Either way, this school has produced a generation of very extraordinary individuals. I am rather the anomaly, me, sitting here writing about how much I enjoy normal parenthood. Look through the aggregate of my friends' facebook pages and you'll see more photos of Indian or African children than you will of the sort of bouncing white babies that fill my photostream. My former classmates (if they failed to become doctors or laywers or captains of industry) are all off somewhere in the nether regions of the globe shaming me with their impossibly good/interesting/uncomfortable lives.

So I scraped my intended post about appliqued bags for electronic chargers. You'll have to wait till tomorrow for that.

Look. I'm not cut out for the kind of interesting greatness that sells subscriptions to Wired Magazine. All those genes got distributed to other members of my family. My brother spent a summer in China learning to become a Ninja. Dan's brother did four years in the Peace Corps and came back with a Gabonese bride. Me, I sit at home and think to myself "Thank God SOMEONE ELSE is doing that stuff. That really frees up my schedule for knitting and surfing the web."

Back in 1995, whoever would have guessed that my lab partner assigned by alphabetical order of our last names would be one day writing sentences like this one:

He asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I gave him a rough number, and then he asked me if I really hadn’t paid for any of them....

Anyway, it's a good read. Go to it if you're interested. And alls I've got to say is: Thank God I turned in my half of the homework.

Five bags to organize the chargers and cords that hang around my desk, only get used once a week, and serve as choking/strangulation hazards for the extra six days. I sewed the felt bags out of leftover material from Harvey's Christmas stocking, and appliqued little images on top to tell me which chargers go where.

I played around with how I wanted the top hem to go, so you'll see they're all different. In the end, I think I like the front-ways sheered hem the best, but perfection is fleeting in life as in art, donchathink?

The iPod fabric is a cut-out from 2 yards I bought in Ithaca the month before I got pregnant. I'd been saving it for a baby dress in the event that Harvey was a girl, but he wasn't, and I'm still hoarding that fabric miserly, cherishing it for little B whenever she decides to show up in our lives. (Earth to Leah: sex is required for conception of a second child. This perhaps is the subject of another post.) On the other hand, it's wasteful to keep so much inventory clogging up the shelves, and I should just make that dress already and use the rest to sew Harvey some pants. Maybe that'll be the subject for next weekend. After all, he does love orange.

So that's what I made over the weekend. Two hours tops, which makes me think I should spend less time talking about what I'm going to sew and more time just sewing it. Oh, and bragging about it. Did I mention I sewed something? You can leave your amazement in the comments.

To my credit, I was also stunningly attractive.

(Visual proof that 1993 was actually in the '80s.)

It was a time of great bangitude (of the hair variety). I twirled around my bedroom singing "Leah Archibald... Leah Archibald..."

I guess this is not so cute sounding now... now that it's written on my business cards.

On March 5th 1993 Dan and I we went on a date to Chadwicks WITH HIS PARENTS. At Dan's prompting I ordered a Turkey club, even though I had absolutely no idea what that was. Honestly, I expected something out of the Flintstones to arrive on the dinner table. Instead came a sandwich with so many layers of bread that I could have broken my jaw putting my mouth around it.

That was the first of many exciting things that Dan would introduce me to. Like mountain biking. And fried eggs. And the internet.

Ten years and one month later, Dan and I sat in my college dorm room, trying to figure out what to do in the face of my obstinate plans to move to LA. "I don't want to go through all the trouble dating you," Dan said, "If we don't plan on getting married."
"Okay," I said. "So let's get married."
Dan said, "I'll see if the church is free next weekend."

Our parents said, "NOT UNTIL YOU LIVE TOGETHER FIRST!!!"

So Dan moved out to LA and started this blog.

On September 4th 2005 we were married. I weighed 115 pounds. I just wanted to slip that in here because it will never happen again. A month later our lives changed irreperably forever. We visited the animal shelter in Sterling MA and spotted a mangey looking pup cowering in the corner. "That's ours!" Dan said. We took him home and became a family.

Then in June 2009 we got made an even bigger family with the addition of Harvey Douglas.

Harvey Douglas Archibald. A name I hadn't thought to fantasize about 17 years ago. He brings on all sorts of new dreams for the future. Primary among them, is that he grows up to look like my Danny.

And lets his bangs fly in the breeze.

Happy Valentine's day.

The main kind of diapers we looked into were diety-service diapers, flushable diapers, and pocket diapers. If there is any other category of cloth diapers I will be amazed, but you never know. Leaky poop all over your bed is the mother of invention, after all. (If you want a whole website of helpful cloth diaper comparison information, go there and stop reading this post!)

We decided on a pocket-type diaper because 1) there's no diaty service in our area, and 2) flushable diapers require walking from the changing table to the toilet, and like I said before, lazy. There are a bunch of different pocket-type diapers to choose from, but from my extensive research (okay, two friends and one website) the best is the Bum Genius 3.0. And how can you not be with a name like that?

WHAT IT TAKES:
We have about 30 diapers in various fun colors. When Harvey soils one we take the insert out and throw both diaper and insert into a big Simple Human pail lined with a cloth bag. (Each diaper comes with two different size inserts so that they fit him better as a newborn but absorb better when he's a heavy pee-er. Which Harvey is. A pee-er of the realm you could even say.)

Every other day we take out the bag (and put in a clean bag - you need two) and throw the diapers in the washer. You can't wash the diapers in the bag, but you can sort of press the bottom of the bag up to push all the diapers into the washer without touching them. Whatever - when you're a parent you touch a lot of gross things - you get over it. We wash the diapers for 30 minutes on cold with mountain green soap, and then 30 minutes on cold/hot again with soap. Then we put them in the dryer for an hour and they're done!

Well, not quite done. What you have then is a big laundry basket filled with diaper tops and diaper inserts. It takes about half an hour to put them all together and back into the baskets. But I wouldn't say that's a deterrent to the process. When you're watching a baby all day, there's A LOT of sitting around time.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE HIPPY!
We also use cloth wipes, which I highly recommend. We have about 50 of them. Half of them (actually 21 - I've counted) go in our wipes warmer (thanks Matt!) with a mixture of baby soap and water. The other stay in a basket by the changing pad, because sometimes you need both wet and dry wipes to do a job, if you know what I'm saying. If you're a parent, you know what I'm saying.

CAVEATS
We didn't start cloth diapers for about two weeks were when Harvey was first born. This is mostly because I wanted to oversee the whole process vis a vis the washing machine, and didn't realize I wasn't going to get out of bed for that long. So other people put him in plastic diapers, and the world didn't implode. And I'll even say that for the first couple days where black tar-like liquid is coming out of your baby it's not a bad idea to throw away a few diapers. Mother nature won't fine you, and also the hundred grandparents in your house won't come in every five minutes while you're sleeping to say HOW DO I SNAP THIS THING ON, AGAIN???

Which is actually a big benefit of the bum genius that I forgot to mention - they go on like regular diapers, which is to say with the same general shape, so that even babysitters can do it. If you ever leave your child with a baby sitter that is. That's another issue.

Another time we took a break from bum genius was when we went camping at H=5-weeks-old. Then we brought along plastic diapers due to the lack of washing machine at the camp site. Our hippy identity was only saved by the fact that we were TAKING A 5-WEEK-OLD CAMPING!

Even so, I'm glad we had that brief experiment with plastic diapers, because it reaffirmed our belief that cloth diapers are actually neater. In the plastic ones Harvey's poop got all spread around and smushed to his butt causing more rash, whereas it absorbs better into the cloth ones. Also? Plastic diapers are really expensive! Sure the cloth ones are a big investment up front, but then we're done buying diapers until he's potty trained.

MORE S—- TO BUY!
The other things I found helpful with diapering on the go are a big diaper bag, since packing cloth diapers takes a bit more room, and two wet bags for the road (two so that one can be in the wash sometimes - although a plastic bag from CVS will work just as well if you happened to forget your canvas bags at home one time you horrible hippy race traitor.)

And if you want more resources on washing cloth diapers, like I said I've found this site helpful. You can even print out their washing instructions and tape them to the front of the washing machine.

Beats paper towels any day.

It's even expected! What to Expect says that most moms aren't up for sex during the post-partum period. Scanning their article, it appears that the factors are stacked against us: Lack of sleep, hormones for breast-feeding, soreness after delivery... wait what? How long are they talking about waiting here? Oh... SIX WEEKS??? Where's the entry for "I haven't had sex in seven months and there are climbing vines growing over the entrance to my secret garden?"

I typed that string into google, but it came back with zero results. So okay, I haven't had sex in eight months. I guess I am totally alone.

What happened is this. First the midwife suggested that my complaint of unbearable pain with intercourse was a symptom of vaginismus, a disease that may or may not be made up, with the only symptom being pain with intercourse. Which actually makes the picture seem more rosy than it is. After all, I had pain with childbirth but the kid still got out into the air okay. Sex, on the other hand, is completely non-starter for us these days. Dan so much as looks at me lustily and I start sobbing in anticipation. But I'm getting ahead of the story, because it turns out that this possibly made up frigidity disease? I don't actually have it.

You see, after going to the gynecologist for an exam, the doctor decided that I don't actually have vaginismus, but a lack of estrogen due to breast-feeding. She proscribed a topical estrogen cream (which didn't work) and also said the situation might improve when the baby started solid foods (it didn't). Then she said to come back in a month if the matter didn't "clear up," but she cancelled that follow-up appointment because her son was sick that day. Really I think she was so jazzed up with her estrogen cream that she called in sick so her husband and her could do it all afternoon in the car. But that's just my opinion.

If I was the kind of person who liked doctors (or at least didn't harbor a pathological fear of them) I would have called to reschedule the appointment, and I even dialed half the number a few times, but I couldn't think of what to say to the receptionist.
"Hi I'd like to make an appointment with Dr. Jones."
"Okay, what's the appointment about."
"Um, er, I haven't had sex in eight months."

I don't know whether the receptionist would gasp and say "egads!" or roll her eyes and say "so?" Maybe depends on the last time she had a little date time with her husband in the car.

For the record, I wasn't always so frigid. See this post about the full-page spread I got in my high school yearbook.** Plus, I know people who are frigid, and they don't make scarves embroidered with porn (NSFW, unless you work for ETSY's underground cousin SKETCHSY). So when the doctor told me in that first appointment that "it could be you just don't want to have sex right now" I was all, whaaaa? Meeee? I'm all about the liking sex. Insert dirty joke here!

But then secretly in my brain I'm all, sex makes owies and yelling things. Let's just lie in bed and read separate issues of the Economist.

So here I am at a standstill. Do I wait until the baby is weaned to see if my normal hormones kick in again? Do I visit a (gasp) therapist to talk about my newfound feelings of complete and absolute terror of intimacy? Do I start the search process for a second wife for our marriage? (Note: must have income and be willing to sleep in the basement.) Or do I just act like it doesn't matter, many people have sexless marriages, look at the Clintons. I don't know folks. I don't know.

*Hi google searchers! This blog is funny! Please stay!
** But that was the ONLY sort of spread I did in High School! Don't get to thinking otherwise.