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Asian Persuasion
I have a nursing chair. It’s actually the old sad chair with a sheet over it. We were going to recover it but that ended up being 800 bucks and I opted to spend my well-earned money on the bugaboo stroller instead. Then I ordered a slipcover online. That was a big mistake. When they say “fits all size wingback chairs”, they lie. The slipcover was a nice color but it looked awful. It looked worse than the sheet that looks pretty bad. I sent it back. It was sloppy and hung loosely over parts that didn’t exist. I hate mail-order stuff sometimes.
My “nursing chair” happens to be positioned right next to a sliding glass door that opens out onto our patio. The same patio that is the entryway to our house. Imagine me sitting there, boob exposed, gazing off into the distance, perhaps watching some birds fly by, and then the UPS man shows up! Hello! Exposed Boob! UPS man! Aaaack! Quick grab whatever you can grab to cover yourself and the adorable sputtering baby!!!
So that left me with a conundrum. When I’m not the one-handed-nursing-bandit multi-tasking at the computer, I like to sit in my nursing chair and enjoy the view out the sliding glass door. Sometimes I even open the door and let the breeze keep Baby Bug awake (as she has a habit of falling asleep mid-feeding and cold air sometimes brings her back from the dead). BUT this doesn’t work when unexpected visitors come up the stairs. I had to think of something. Curtains wouldn’t work because the sliding glass door is the only window in Baby Bug’s room. I NEED light. Without natural light, I will shrivel up and die. I thought and I thought and I thought until I came up with a brilliant solution!
Rice paper!
I can make my sliding glass door like a shoji screen! It lets the light in, keeps the spying eyes out and it’s pretty and zen-ish! I love shoji screens! I hopped online and ordered some rice paper from this fantabulous website (so much better than the stupid art store that never has anything in stock that I’m looking for) and four days later, Viola! I have rice paper on my sliding glass door.
It’s not perfect. Toby hasn’t said whether he likes it or not, which usually means he doesn’t. And I admit it looks a little hokey pokey from the outside looking in, but it works. It works fabulously. The UPS guy sees nothing but paper! While I can sit close to it and look right through. I love gazing through it. Everything looks pretty through soft rice paper flower holes. It makes me feel calm and peaceful and Baby Bug loves it too. She stares at it constantly, pulling my nipple sideways painfully in the process.
Maybe you’re wondering what all those other pictures in the slideshow have to do with my nursing chair and the rice-papered sliding glass door. Well, it’s this: I have a lot of Asian-inspired things! I seem to collect them without meaning to. I never even really realized it until today. Though my mom would probably tell you otherwise because I’m always itching to go to Chinatown to buy my nieces silk pajamas. I cannot wait to get Baby Bug some. She’ll be so cute!
I must have been Chinese in another life. I do love orange special chicken!
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Happy Valentine’s Day!
I have so many things to blog about, I don’t even know where to start. The site is back up. That’s big news around here. I spent the last two days attached to my laptop with one hand and the baby with the other.
The hand that was attached to my laptop was typing into yahoo instant messenger to my new host couple who are the nicest people on the planet. They are not only hosting this site but they also walked me through step by step how to modify wordpress templates. Believe me, that’s a lot because I don’t understand a flip of CSS. I think C.S.S. stands for Crappy Site Stuff. But actually CSS is really cool and not crappy at all, except that I don’t understand it and I feel like a bungling fool. There are still so many things to fix. Like you’re probably wondering where all the spy emblems went. I still have them, don’t worry. I just have to figure out where to put them. The comments are saved too… they just haven’t decided to show up yet.
The other hand (that wasn’t attached to my laptop) was holding the baby to my boob. That was almost more of challenge than learning CSS. I should draw a cartoon of all the positions I go through to try to get Baby Bug to latch on. It could be like a kama sutra book but without the erotica.
We’ve tried it on the floor, we’ve tried it on my desk, we’ve tried the football hold and the cradle hold. We’ve tried it with the boppy and without the boppy. We’ve tried it in the dark, we’ve tried it in the light. We’ve tried it in every room in the house! It’s no use. When she makes up her mind that she’s going to be badger baby, there is just nothing you can do but wait it out. It’s almost like she gets traumatized by one failed attempt to latch on and then every single thing I try after that makes her scream because she’s remembering how awful failure is.
I feel so bad when she’s upset at me. They say you can’t spoil a baby before they are three months and it’s okay to pick them up when they cry. They say picking a baby up when it cries teaches them that they can trust you. So I’m thinking that Baby Bug is learning that she can’t trust me because every time I pick her up and try to nurse her, she has some kind of trauma. And if it’s not that, it’s the tummy ache that I must have given her by eating broccoli or something. I know she won’t remember this and she’s still learning that she can trust me but I still give myself major guilt trips every time she cries. I guess this is just part of motherhood.
But this post isn’t all about Baby Bug and our many nursing tribulations. It’s really supposed to be a lengthy thank you and ode of adoration to the Stranahans. They have been so wonderful to me these last few days. I thought I was indebted to the last guy who hosted this site for me. Now I really know the meaning of indebtedness. They stayed inside on a perfectly nice sunny day, probably ignored their kid’s pleas to go outside and play ball, and helped me put this mess of a website back together piece by piece. “Can I have three columns? No, can I have two? Can I put my archives in scroll bars? Can I have an image map in my masthead” etc. etc. etc… My requests are endless and of course I still have a wish list a mile long.
And another thing! One of those perfectly nice sunny days was the wife’s birthday. Get this: on her birthday, she chose to spend the day transferring files from my old ftp site to my new ftp site. Nice birthday present… um, to me! I know. I should be banished to a corner somewhere.
So do you think they will let me pay them for all their hours and hours of labor and patience with me? Not to mention server space and bandwidth? NO! I have to be creative and think up some sneaky way to thank them. I will. I have to.
