Trying not to be neurotic

Synonyms for neurotic include: anxious, fearful, fixated, irrational, hung-up and obsessed. Most of the words describe me pretty well when it comes to raising Izzy. Admitting you have a problem is the first step right? Well, here's where I explain why being anxious about her influences, fixated on her diet and obsessed with the childcare she receives may not be all that bad.
I find it APPAULING that there is still such a discrepancy in gender roles in children's television. In my college media course we were asked to survey television shows and produce a paper theorizing commonalities in mass media. I watched 15 different children’s shows, and many episodes of each, and there were two themes that were shockingly apparent. 1) Male characters were almost always the lead character and possessed unmatched intelligence while their female cohorts were “along for the ride.” 2) When the show was an all female cast they donned skimpy outfits that leads only to objectification of women. Since then it’s been in the back of my mind that when I have children not only would I limit the amount of TV they watch, but also the types of shows they watch, the books they read and the toys they play with. Now that I have a little girl I’m more fearful that these negative influences will undermine her self-esteem and passion. I know I can’t protect her from every influence out there, hell I’m already switching radio stations because it’s acceptable to say ass in a song. But what I’m unsure of is how far should I take my concerns? My mother in law bought Izzy a princess coloring book for Easter. There’s a bug-eyed beauty page after page. I’ve only once voiced my concern that these characters don’t wear enough clothing. I haven’t given her my spiel about the women looking like they work as escorts or being super dependent on men to save them. So what do I do?
Next, and pretty high on my “makes me sound like a loon” list is the food we all consume. Forget the processed foods and crap that can sit on your shelf for 30 years, survive nuclear war, and still be consumable. I don’t touch it and neither will Izzy. It’s the seemingly less harmful things that she can imbibe on a day to day basis. First up, that delicious white stuff that is used to make the yummiest ice cold treat out there, milk. Or as Izzy calls it kkkk. I choose to give Izzy organic milk. It’s really important to me that there are no hormones or antibiotics in something that makes up the majority of her liquid intake. The woman who runs the daycare thinks I’m batty. My response? If it were such a crazy idea, why is it readily available in the grocery store? And why are so many articles now proclaiming the evils of antibiotics and hormones in our food? Next up, consider juice. Harmless right? Why should I give her sugar flavored water that lacks nutrients? It’s a totally different story if the juice is actually from fruit, and doesn’t have additives. But even then, she should get the real thing first. Every time I see “FJ” on her daycare report I cringe. Even after I asked them not to give my daughter fruit juice they still do. “But she likes it.” Of course she does, sugar is like crack to an 18 month old! So I remain ever vigilant about giving Izzy non-contaminated drinks. I could write a novel about food, so perhaps I’ll save that for a future post.
And the last thing I mentioned being obsessed with is Izzy’s care. (Warning, I’m keeping it to my top three because I don’t want to lose my readers. Trust me, I’m neurotic about plenty of things.) I don’t think it’s uncommon for a parent to think about their child during the work day. I think plenty of parents wonder if their child is getting the best care, or is being treated fairly all the day long. What could be out of the ordinary is that there are days were it pervades my every thought, every moment of the day. Once she’s safely dropped off I worry about her crying, and is her care taker responding sympathetically or just “toughening her up” by abrasively switching gears. Does her care taker knit-pick her every move shaking her self-esteem and confidence? Or does her care taker let her stomp around oblivious to destruction or danger that my little baby can get into? Is the care taker at all aware of child development stages and how important our reactions are to them? I probably ask myself more questions about what people are doing with my child all day long than an interrogator querying a criminal. Sure, part of it is guilt driven. I want to be with her and think she would be better off with her mom all day. But the other part of it is that I don’t know what she’s learning or experiencing at this age. She can’t tell me what’s happening. There are plenty of secondary concerns like is she bonding with them better than she bonds with me? But what it all comes down to is I have learned to keep my mind very busy with work, and put faith in God that everything is turning out the way it should. Sure Sunday night and Monday morning have turned into a habitual tear fest, but at least I’m productive during the day.
So perhaps the fears I’ve mentioned, coupled with the ones I haven’t, make me neurotic. Or do they just make me a parent? My OBGYN told me that I’ll have to face this fear, and ones just like it from here on out. He has three children so he speaks from experience when he says having faith in God is the only way to ease the anxiety and fearfulness.

Eek! A Tick!

One of my favorite times with Izzy is when she just wakes up from a restful night. She quietly plays with her toys until one of us goes in to pick her up. This morning was not as much fun. She was in a delightful mood and had picked up her comb. I sat down with her and started to do her hair when I saw it. A black speck with legs on the back of my baby's head. I instantly identified it as a tick and yelled for Joe to help remove the nasty little crawly who had embedded itself into my daughters head. I knew it would take two of us and he would be much calmer about it.
After a game of distract Izzy with toys she isn't allowed to play with and some quick tweezer action from Joe, the tick was safely removed from Izzy's sweet little head.
We finished the morning according to our normal routines and Izzy was off to daycare. Here's what I've learned from our tick scare:

• You have to remove the whole tick. I remembered hearing that before, but without Joe's quick and precise hands, we may not have fared so well.
• If you save the tick, some towns will test them for lyme disease. (This mean little POS is sitting in a bottle on the window sill in my kitchen. I HOPE IT FRIES in the sun.)
• Smaller ticks are the ones more likely to carry lyme. This one isn't too small, but I don't want to take any chances.
• For the next 30 days we have to watch out for: a rash anywhere on her body, not just the site of the tick bite, fever/body aches.
• Clean the site of the bite and keep it clean.
• Some research shows that a tick needs to be embedded/gorging on blood for 24 hours before Lyme Disease is transferred.
• The state of CT doesn't allow daycares (even small family centers like the one Izzy goes to) to spray their yards with pesticides that could protect from ticks. So I have to spray my kid with bug spray instead. Makes a lot of sense. You can't use one chemical but you can use another? This is a whole other story. I know I have dogs and the tick could very well have traveled in on them. Or the tick could have fell on Izzy from a tree while we were outside. But we just got a notification from daycare saying she was no longer allowed to spray her yard for ticks and we should be very diligent about checking at home.

Needless to say I'm ticked that this nasty little bug bit my daughter, but I do find a little comfort knowing that the tick seems to be bigger than a deer tick and it wasn't there for very long. Just another lesson in parethood. I'll be checking Izzy from head to toe from now on.

what I didn't expect now that I'm expecting

My big realization
I’ve been struggling since the conference I coordinated concluded. Shouldn’t it feel great to complete a task? And shouldn’t it feel even better knowing that no one has ever done it as well? Nope, I’m not left with warm fuzzies after this one. After weeks of over-analyzing my work, and my feelings, I’ve come to the realization that I’m just not satisfied unless my boss is super impressed with me. I’ve been looking for him to laud me with enthusiasm. I thought success on this project would lead to challenging new projects and inclusion on problem solving for tough organizational issues. Instead, I’ve been cast aside to toil over subordinate issues that a janitor could solve. (Sorry janitors, but let’s be honest, there aren’t many Good Will Huntings out there.)
My mind has been churning over the concern of why I’m in this predicament. And sadly, the answer is so clear, but I just haven’t wanted to wrestle with it. I’m pregnant. Give me a moment to explain. The months leading up to the conference were some of the most challenging of my professional career. I juggled several tasks and projects from my boss and he poured more on knowing that I could handle it. What he didn’t know was that I had a threatened pregnancy and daily, dealt with the possibility of losing the baby. I couldn’t escape and turn to my normal exercise routine because I was restricted from activity. I couldn’t turn to my husband for comfort because he was working 90 ish hours a week. (Not that he wasn’t there for me whenever I called him, but how would crying to him every few hours have helped?) So I did what I do best; cloud my mind by filling up my work calendar with any task I could get my hands. The only comfort I found was in spending time with my beautiful daughter. (I could write a novel on how amazing she is and how blessed I am that I get to be her mother.)
No one at work knew what I was going through. And I kept the pregnancy a secret from my boss until the day before we left for the conference. At 15 weeks I was unmistakably showing and would no doubt be questioned by those who knew me best. And the best reason for finally coming clean was that the possibility of miscarriage had dramatically dropped. After coming clean I thought the relief would wash over me like the warm rays in sunny Florida, a beautiful setting for our conference. But just like the unseasonable weather when we arrived, I was shocked by how cold my boss was to me. Like a switch had been flipped and I was no longer his go-to-gal for tough dilemmas. The faith he had in me vanished and he began to question every decision. I blocked it out and until colleagues started asking me if I were ok dealing with his constant questioning and adverse attitude to my decisions. I pushed through it like a good event-planning soldier. There are two things that matter in event planning; 1) what’s the experience like for the attendee and 2) are my staff members on their game? I saw smile after smile on the attendees faces. And the survey results reflected their delight with raves about this being the best conference for the company they have ever been to.
What I should have done was taken all the upbeat, positive reviews to fuel the end of conference work. Instead, I just crumbled. Exhaustion from being pregnant and running around for 16 hours a day slammed into me. I wanted to curl up in my bed and sleep for a month. It's taken quite a while for me to really accept that maybe I've been expecting too much from myself and from others. I didn't expect that work wouldn't feel as rewarding. I didn't expect that my colleages would treat me differently. I expected that I could handle everything and excute just as well as I have in the past. Having time to think through these things has given me some answers, like stop expecting so much from myself. But I know I have a pretty tough decision ahead of me. It's time to find the balance, or identify that I just can't make being a career woman and a super mom work.

Banishing "I Can't Wait"

Watching Izzy develop every day is so amazing. Seems like she is always doing something new and I So many times I've caught myself saying, "I can't wait for Izzy to" (fill in the blank). When I found her sitting in the crib one morning I was giddy with excitement which quickly led to, I can't wait until she crawls.

Why? Why can't I wait? Everyone tells me how fleeting these moments of discovery are. And it's true, Izzy is now walking and I can't believe I was in a rush for her newest skill. Truth is she's less of a baby every day, and I can't get those moments back. I have beautiful memories, but pushing her to do the next thing shouldn't be my automated response.

I can wait. I can sit back and enjoy these moments of pure joy. That day that I found Izzy sitting up in her crib I was amazed, and from then on I decided that "I can't wait . . ." would be banished from my thought process. Any time I spend thinking about her next step or pushing her to grow up is time that I'm missing being fully immersed in the moment.

While Izzy will always be my baby, she won't be a baby for much longer. And when I'm watching her walk across the stage to receive her diploma, or marching down an isle to start her own family, I'll always fondly remember the times where we lived in the moment. I can wait for that.

Maybe it wasn't dance, maybe it was me

Last week when I wrote about being uninspired and slightly depressed about a dance class I took. I don't think I gave proper credit to who I took the class with. Really it wasn't about what movement, or not being excited to be in a cardio class, having some me time. I was feeling down about not having friends in the area, and not being able to make friends. I've been going to this class for months and I'm not even friends with anyone from this school on facebook.
What made me realize that I was more upset about the social aspect, than my skills was taking aclass a few days later with Laura. We've been friends for almost 10 years, and we met in a dance class. I have a very small circle of people that I know I can count on for anything. She's always there for me. From an affirmation that my outfit is cute to flying from far away to be a bridesmaid at my wedding.
The class was so much fun. We didn't talk during the class, but we both enjoyed class, and we could talk endlessly over cupcakes after class. That's a big part of friendship to me. It's sharing experiences. Sharing things about us that make us who we are. And I'm so blessed to have a friend to share dance, among other things, with.

Izzy's First Birthday Celebration - Freak Snow Storm

Well it's a good thing we didnt plan a huge party at our tiny home complete with outdoor activities. Who knew a freak snow storm would assault the northeast the day before Izzy's birthday. The storm that dumped heavy snow onto trees, already battered by a hurricane but still with leaves, that consquently came crashing down on power lines and crippling the northeast. I thank God that we had electricity, it's 10 days later and my sister's power just restored.
Our small gathering of immediate family members and very close friends, (we're talking bridesmaids/groomsmans from our wedding and the grandparents and aunts and uncle) was quiet and just right for our shy little Izzy. I was a little nervous that all eyes on her would lead to a very bashful and self-conscious 1 year old. The familiar atmosphere at home and the friendly faces certainly helped. By naptime she had her fill of food, cake and presents. I'm really glad that I didn't go overboard like I have a tendancy to do. Instead the party was just right for Izzy.

Dance, do you still love me?

I love to dance. I anxiously anticipate weddings because I can break it down in a sea of happy dancers. And I never thought te day would come where I regretted ever proclaiming my love for dance. But it happened. It happened when I was mid-box step in a cardio dance class. I looked around the room, saw how happy everyone was and my heart sank. My feet were still moving, but all the energy had been sucked out of. It's still a mystery why I lost the feeling, and I tried to get back into it, but there I was sashe-ing across the floor with limp noodle arms. I don't normally compare myself, but in that moment, everyone in the room was better than me. Sassy stay at home mom had great tempo, peppy twenty-something had ebullience, too good for everyone blondie tossed her hair like a pro. Here were all these women working it, and there I was, miserable.
I couldn't explain it. I glanced at the door imagining a grand escape, never to return. The instructor would casually remark how weird my exit was and I'd be forgotten. I pushed on, made it to the part where we all clap because it was a "great class". As I changed to street sneakers the pockets of conversations started, and I found myself with no one to talk to. I darted to my car before the tears started. I was embarrassed for not knowing how to make friends, devastated because I felt like dance had deserted me and just overwhelmed that I was about to dive back into a never-ending pile of work.
I'm not sure what all this means. I can only hope it was just one off night. I'll head back to class on Saturday for another round in the battle to meet friends while doing something for me.