My dear friend Pea Soup participates in Self Portrait Tuesdays. I think this is a blogworld tradition, but as I am new to blogging, I’m not very certain. I have precious few shots of me and my Buggaboo, mostly because I’m always holding him and taking pictures of him. This was a very difficult pose, holding my camera up and taking a picture of our reflection in a mirror that is propped in my office. Sort of reminds me of the Statue of Liberty. Bring me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. We spend alot of time here, and I put the mirror there for his fun and enjoyment. He recognized me in the reflection and looked at my reflection intently, then tilted his head back to look up at me, with a puzzled look on his face, then back at the reflection! He kept doing this, wondering, why are there two mamas ! He’s SOOOOO darn CUUUUUUUUTE!!!
She was right. The doctor confirmed it to be a strawberry hemangioma, but not to be worried. It should go away on its own in due course, but we shall keep an eye on it, in case it becomes very large and obstructs vision.
This icky red thing showed up on my face a couple of weeks ago. My mama thought it was a speck of fluff at first, then she thought it was a scab because I have a tendency to scratch myself these days. I try, but my hands just don’t go exactly where I want them to. This ugly thing got bigger and bigger.
First I scared my mom by kicking and wiggling and nearly getting myself stuck in my bed. It’s a comfy bed, but I think I’m getting to be too big for it. It’s an Amby hammock, and it’s supposed to be good for my development, but honestly, I like to snuggle up next to my mom more than I like to hang out in this comfy hammock.
Later, I took a shower and got all nice and clean. I’m not quite sure what I think of this water business.
Then I got all snuggly buggly before it was time to get dressed.
We went to my mom’s company picnic today. It would have been much more exciting if I were a little bit older. It was hot outside and I mostly slept, but I did make sure I urped all over myself and my mommy a few times. When I woke up, I got my picture taken with Daisy Duck (but that picture is still in my daddy’s camera). I also got this super cool froggy tattoo. My mama likes froggies, and so do I.
I found this list when I was trying to figure out what the Gulag Archipelago had to do with giant sea turtles (see galactagogue). I don’t know what it means, but I found it interesting.
If you have read the whole book, bold it. If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, ** it.
1 The Bible
2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4 The Koran
5 Arabian Nights
6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25 Ulysses by James Joyce
26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29 Candide by Voltaire
30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31 Analects by Confucius
32 Dubliners by James Joyce
33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69 The Talmud
70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78 Popol Vuh
79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80 Satyricon by Petronius
81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103 Nana by Emile Zola
104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111 Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
112 The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
113 The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
114 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115 The Witches of Worm, Zilpha Keatly Snyder
Today is a day of note. Today my Buggaboo showed me that he can sit unattended. He’s such a superstar!
I can’t stop! It’s so typical of me. I find interest in something and it consumes my mind so that I spend far too much time engrossed and immersed. I shouldn’t be alarmed. I know this too shall pass. Like the time I became interested in baby wearing. It started with a Snugli before Buggaboo was born. Then came the ring sling from eBay. Then the Premaxx, again from eBay. Then the eleven variations of SPOC from Mamatoto’s Make Your Own. Then the Mei Tai, or ABC –my favorite. I’ve made five. First with the Mamatoto Make Your Own instructions. Next on to the internet, where I joined a Yahoo group (traditional-baby-carriers). Found a great site with lots of instructions and finally ended up at Beth’s Mei Tai, whose design and instructions I liked the best. Of course I had to modify them for me and my Buggaboo, as we are both above average in girth and dimension, and I can’t leave well enough alone anyway, always looking for the ideal, the ultimate, the best of all possible worlds (I’ll thank Tartuffe for that last one, from a million or two years ago). I even made new pattern and layout drawings that I’ve been meaning to send to Beth, but haven’t gotten around to it. It’s on the list. One of many. I have bound journals filled with lists. Things to Do. My life is lived by the list. I like order in the scheme of things (just a little OCD, not a lot). Sometimes I even finish a list. I find them when I’m going through stacks of this and that, sometimes years, even decades old. It’s amazing that although I’d long forgotten the list, so many of its items have come to pass. Marry a good man. Have a healthy baby. Those two took much longer than I’d ever have thought (they weren’t 100 percent in the sphere of things I could control). But they happened!! Thanks be to God!
I used to have greyhounds. They are wonderful pets. Who ever would have known I dived into that world too. Became an advocate and adoption volunteer. A foster hound-mom. I loved those dogs! I can’t even say how many coat variations and designs I came up with for them. My brother-in-law used to say they had a bigger wardrobe than he did. (Greyhounds are very lean with short hair and need a little something extra to keep them warm in a cool climate.) The best outfit was the buckskin ensemble, moccassins, fringe, and all. Made from real suede (I chopped up an old coat I found at a thrift store for a couple dollars). Even an Indian (would native American be PC ) headdress with big beautiful wild turkey feathers (from real wild turkeys that used to gobble gobble on property I once had in this fair land). My boy Jet strutted about the houndfest in that (greyhound folk get IN to it, and have meets and festivals — it’s greyt!!), oblivious to most things, and wondering why on earth his hound-mom made him wear such ridiculous things on his feet. Alas, Buggaboo came along and I reached my limit. Sadly, I found myself unable to be the supermom and super hound-mom I wanted to be, so Buggabbo won and I let my beautiful hounds go (happily they were adopted by loving families immediately and didn’t even have to spend one night alone in a dark and scary kennel). I still have guilt issues to resolve.
So. Of zeal and obsession. I love to write! It means nothing and goes round and round and ends up nowhere, but I do enjoy the ride.
I love the sound of this word! It makes me think of giant sea turtles. I know why. Phonetic association. We had a radio in our kitchen when I was growing up and my mom used to listen to NPR and the radio reader, Dick Estelle. I recall fragments like “archipelago” and some “g” word. At first I think it must be The Gulag Archipelago, but no, that’s not about giant sea turtles. Maybe Dick Estelle read the Gulag Archipelago on the Radio Reader. That would have taken quite some time. The “g” word must be “Galapagos”. The Galapagos Archipelago has giant sea turtles. I wonder what book that was. It makes me think of James Michener.
Alas, galactagogues have nothing to do with giant sea turtles. A galactagogue is an agent that promotes the secretion and flow of milk. I’m trying to boost my milk supply. Buggaboo started daycare this week and suddenly his formula consumption is up to 12 oz/day and he has a runny nose. He IS teething, so perhaps his immune system is compromised a bit, and he is now exposed to five other wee ones on a daily basis. I want him to have more mother’s milk and less supplementation.
I’ve sported these double-D’s for nearly three decades, and in my time of need when they were called into duty, who would have thought that they wouldn’t produce My poor hungry Buggaboo. Nursing was a nightmare. He wouldn’t latch properly and got angry that nothing was there anyway. His weight dropped alarmingly and off to the hospital we went. The lactation specialist had me pump and after 30 minutes I had only 28 cc. I opted for a prescription galactagogue –Reglan. It’s not actually a galactagogue by design. That’s just a bonus side effect. I think it’s normally prescribed to reduce nausea in cancer patients. It has other undesirable side effects as well, namely lethargia and depression. Just what a mother needs in those post-partum days. I took it for two weeks. I recall that I couldn’t talk to anybody for two weeks (depression) and I would literally pass out for a little while each night. I know those first few weeks are a blur of crazy mood changes and exhaustion anyway, so don’t know how much of that was exacerbated by the Reglan. It helped with the milk supply though. I still had to supplement, but I was able to produce about 750 cc/day, which is a dramatic improvement from the measly 250 cc I was able to pump prior to that.
I need to make more though! I read up on Fenugreek and started taking it last week. It seems to be the wonder cure for many things. Why didn’t I try this earlier I might have been able to avoid supplementation altogether. I hope it works for me. I’ve been able to pump around 825 cc/day this week. My Buggaboo eats a lot! He started out at 10 lbs 7 oz, and is now around 25 lbs. He is six months old now, healthy and beautiful. I am very blessed.
Shoogga Boogga Boogga Woogga
Shoogga Boogga Boo
Shoogga Boogga Boogga Woogga
Tell Me, Who Are You
Shoogga Boogga Boogga Woogga
Shoogga Boogga Boo
Shoogga Boogga Boogga Woogga
You’re Mama’s Buggaboo!
Shoogga Boogga Boogga Woogga
Shoogga Boogga Boo
Shoogga Boogga Boogga Woogga
Mama Sure Loves You!
Biggedy Buggedy Buggedy Boo
Snuggely Buggely Boo
Buggedy Biggedy Biggedy Boo
Somebody Loves Her Buggaboo!
Biggedy Buggedy Buggedy Boo
Snuggely Buggely Boo
Buggedy Biggedy Biggedy Boo
Guess Who Loves Her Buggaboo
Biggedy Buggedy Buggedy Boo
Snuggely Buggely Boo
Buggedy Biggedy Biggedy Boo
Mama Loves Her Buggaboo!
