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Baby Rabies

pregnancy & parenting

  • Start Here
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    • Favorite Pregnancy Apps
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    • Birth Stories
    • Perinatal Mood Disorders
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      Photography

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      December 13, 2018

      Photography

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      December 6, 2018

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      November 27, 2018

      Photography

      Learn How To Take And Edit Photos On…

      November 19, 2018

  • Reviews
    • Reviews

      The Answer To Last Minute Holiday Gifting For…

      December 19, 2018

      Reviews

      I Was Never A Barbie Girl Until Now

      October 1, 2018

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      Finally! Jeans For My Jean-Averse Kids!

      August 22, 2018

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car

BabiesParenthoodThe Story

The Bright Side Is… I Look 8?

by Jill January 31, 2011
written by Jill

Last night was rough. Not  a lot of sleeping going on for any of us (except the newborn… I’m not even going to tell you all how well she sleeps for fear of death threats and bombs sent to my doorstep). So Starbucks was a necessity while we were out this morning. Before braving the coffee run with a toddler and a newborn in tow, I figured I’d go ahead and feed and change Leyna in the comfort of the warm Jeep. After all, it’s not like I could rely on this particular Starbucks have a changing table for me.

I hoped in the back on the passenger side in the only open seat next to the two carseats. After I finished feeding her and changing her on my lap (gah! how crazy that she is still tiny enough to do that?), I went to open the door only to discover I was LOCKED IN. Oh, the beauty of child safety locks.

No, I couldn’t roll down the windows, the windows were locked, too.

No, I couldn’t climb into the front seat. I tried. My ass got stuck halfway over Leyna’s infant seat and I nearly decapitated her with my knee.

I was stuck. But just when I was thinking I’d have to set off the alarm to catch somebody’s attention, I saw a man and woman leave and head to the truck parked next to me.

I began banging furiously on the window. “HEY!! HEY! I’m stuck!”

The man definitely saw me. He made eye contact, then hurriedly rushed to the other side of his truck. Jerk.

So then I caught the woman’s attention. “HEY! I – NEED – HELP!” I mouthed.

She, too, acted like she didn’t see me. What the hell, people?

The guy came back around to the driver’s side and I gave it all I had. “I’M STUUUUUUCK. HELLLLLPPP!!”

(Please also imagine many flailing hang gestures describing my sticky predicament.)

He very cautiously approached the car. “PLEASE- OPEN- THE- DOOR. CHILD- LOCKS.”

With much hesitation and a very suspicious look on his face, he slowly reached down and openened the door.

“Oh, thank you! I’m so sorry. Child saftety locks. I locked myself in here. I know I TERRIFIED you,” I said at rapid-fire.

“No, you didn’t terrify me. I thought you were an 8 year old girl left in the car. I was going to go inside and see if I could find your mommy,” he replied matter of factly.

“Ha. No. That would be ME. I’m the mommy… the mommy who locked herself in her car. So, thanks again.” And then I went in and got my coffee… the coffee I CLEARLY needed much earlier in the day.

Kendall is 2 2/3 and Leyna is 1 month old… and I look 8, so Yay!?

January 31, 2011 17 comments
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ParenthoodThe Story

“When did we become these people?”

by Jill June 27, 2010
written by Jill

Scott said to me as he tossed a handful of used, dried up wet wipes at me to throw in a garbage bag.

“What people?” I replied, wiping the sweat from my brow while watching Kendall jump around the 110 degree garage from the corner of my eye.

“You know, the people who have shit and junk and cracker crumbs and,” he paused to emerge from the car with a sippy cup containing mystery contents, “and sippy cups rolling around the floors of their nice cars.”

“Uhh… that would be May 2, 2008, when I pushed our first born out of my vagina,” I said with a smirk.

When I turned 16 I didn’t get a car. My parents simply couldn’t afford it. I don’t hold it against them now, although at the time it was terribly tragic. Many tears fell and “THIS IS NOT FAIR!” was shouted excessively. In fact, I didn’t even have a car by the time I went off to college. My dad used to always tell me that if I was just handed a car, I’d take it for granted. He promised that I would take much better care of something I paid for myself. While I can’t say for sure that I would have neglected a brand new car handed to me at my Super Sweet Sixteen party, I can say that I did, in fact, cherish the first vehicle I purchased.

It was the summer after my first year in college. I saw it sitting on the side of the road with a For Sale sign in the front window. *Gasp* “That’s PERFECT!” I squealed from the passenger seat of my best friend’s shiny red Mustang. When I got home I ran into the house, not even taking the time to shut the door behind me, and demanded that my mom get in the car RIGHT. NOW. to go look at it. It was mine in a matter of a week. With the help of family, I was able to put a down payment on it and to sign on the dotted line for a $8k loan, knowing full well this meant I HAD TO GET A JOB the minute I got back to Columbia, MO where I attended college.

That ’94 Jeep Cherokee was my pride and joy. Never a piece of trash did land on the floor for more than a minute. I had a designated small trash bag stowed away in the console at all times, which I emptied constantly. I frequently (like, weekly) took a wad of my tip money from that job that I did land the day after I got back to school as a waitress in a sports bar to the car wash to scrub, polish, shine and vacuum my Jeep inside and out. When I took Cleo, our first puppy and adorable yellow Labrador, to the hiking trail only to have the sky open on us unexpectedly, I was so disturbed by the muddy puppy paw prints all over the back of it that I took my Jeep to the car wash detail place and shelled out $30 that I surely didn’t have at the time to have my seats and floors shampooed.

I literally drove that Jeep until the door fell off. Not at all kidding. My first day at my first really professional job when we lived in Northern Virginia I had to make the choice to pull up in either my husband’s ’93 F150 with no AC (it was May, by the way) or in my Jeep, which would mean I’d have to crawl in and out of the passenger side door because if I unlocked and opened the driver’s side door it would actually, truly fall off. I chose the F150 with the windows down. I was wearing a skirt that day and thought it would be the least ridiculous option.

After a couple real paychecks from that real job rolled in, we decided to treat ourselves to a shiny new Jeep Grand Cherokee. A really super fancy, over the top, ridiculously frivolous model complete with massive car payment. Although I was heartbroken to see my first Jeep go, the second was a fantastic replacement and I quickly got over my heartbreak. Shortly after, we replaced Scott’s F150 with an Infiniti G35 and our car payments then, in total, equated a modest mortgage payment. But we were both working professionals, pulling in enough money to afford them, figuring if we couldn’t ever afford a nice house in NOVA, we could at least drive around in nice cars. Plus, I figured by the time we got around to having kids we’d be done paying them off. Ha! Yeah, that’s back when I was on my “five year plan,” meaning we would have kids five years from whenever somebody asked me when it would happen, even if that was a year after the last time they asked me. In short, it was before the Baby Rabies kicked in.

We took damn good care of those cars. They were washed and vacuumed frequently, nothing left inside, not even so much as a jacket. Even our trunks were organized. I cried like a baby the day my husband accidentally spilled Karo Syrup in the back of my Jeep (used to boost our diabetic English Mastiff’s blood sugar when it dipped too low) on a trip to St. Louis. I knew that was a stain we’d never get out, and it was the first blemish on my immaculate, shiny new vehicle.

Fast forward nearly 5 years later and you’d think our floor boards are where Goldfish Crackers go to die, and a foster home for all dysfunctional and leaky sippy cups. That Karo Syrup stain? Hidden by the layer of embedded dog hair that I haven’t been able to successfully pull up from the carpet in over 2 years. It’s truly the least of my concerns now when I get down about how dirty my new Jeep is.

“We’ll NEVER let *our* kids eat in our cars,” I can hear our younger selves chiding.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. HA.

“Why are parents incapable of cleaning their kid’s shit out of their cars? Seriously, just don’t put every f-ing toy the kid owns in the car. Clean it out every now and then. GEESH,” we would say like we had, in that moment, simply solved an issue that plagues all parents I’ve ever known- how to contain the explosive mess that is a CHILD while in the confines of a vehicle.

Now, I can come up with a laundry list of excuses as to why our vehicles get the way they do, but I’ll just boil it down to this. I don’t have the energy to care. That is, until it’s finally so terrible that I’m corralling renegade toy cars and rolling Snack Traps every time I open the back door to retrieve Kendall from his car seat. Then I usually hit a wall where I become so disgusted by the state of my once shiny vehicle, so disgusted with myself that an IMMEDIATE intervention is necessary.

That leads us to today. We opened up both garage doors and filled a laundry basket full of random crap from both cars. We pulled a small trashbag’s worth of garbage out of both vehicles, then loaded up and headed to the car wash. After driving through the washing bay, we parked next to each other at the vacuums and took turns watching Kendall run back and forth between our two vehicles. At one point Scott shrieked, “Ewww! NO!” Over the sound of my vacuum I mouthed, “what??” Through screaming and miming, he conveyed to me that he caught Kendall letting the vacuum suck on his tongue. I had to laugh. That kid really knows how to push his dad’s germaphobe buttons.

As a side note, and maybe this is a sign of the downtrodden economic times, when the HELL did it become acceptable for random people to come up and start washing my windows (after they’ve ALREADY BEEN WASHED) as I mind my own business and vacuum my car? Oh, they aren’t doing it out of the kindness of their heart. One was looking for a tip from Scott and another was trying to sell me windshield repair. We haven’t had random people wandering up to our cars to clean our windows, unsolicited, and demand money since that one time I flew into Midway at 2 in the morning.

The cars are as clean as two people responsible for keeping a 2 year old alive at a car wash can be. I still have fantasies of getting my Jeep detailed after we send off the last car payment next month (I got Scott a car detail for Valentines Day last year and it was, hands down, the most excited he’s EVER been about anything I’ve given him, except a baby… it was a close second to a baby), but I have a feeling that money will go toward other things, like registration for Soccer Tots in the fall.

I guess we really did become those people we openly mocked 5 years ago. Oh well, what’s new? I look forward to the day Kendall is old enough to clean the cars out for us. It will, for sure, be a requirement to borrowing one someday, which, in a perfect world, would be one of our current cars. We won’t be missing those car payments!

Kendall is 2 years old. Thinking of it as him having only 14 years until driving age is a tad terrifying.

Hey, hey, hey! Guess what? I was nominated for a SocialLuxe BlogLuxe award in 2 categories- Funniest and Blog I’ve Learned the Most From! You guys are awesome. Thank you for the nominations! I’m up against some ridiculously talented competition, who I have no grand ideas of beating, but it would be amazing to be a finalist. Voting is open until July 12th and you can vote once a day. You have to provide your email address and enter a verification code, so it’s a little more involved than just a click, but it would mean the world to me, if you think I’m worthy, if you could take a couple minutes to vote. Here is the link. Thank you, thank you in advance! Winners will be announced at Blogher, the blogging conference I’m attending in August in NYC.

June 27, 2010 25 comments
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BabiesThe Story

On the eve of a road trip…

by Jill March 17, 2009
written by Jill

It seems appropriate to share with you all this interview I just completed.  Kendall and I will be taking off soon, on our own, for a road trip down to south Texas, and while driving long distances with him still isn’t a walk in the park, momnesia pretty much sucked the traumatic memories of those early road trips right out of my brain.  When I began this email, suddenly I was flooded with all the horrific flashbacks of the screams, the static, the vigorous shaking…er…jiggling.  I thought I’d post this here in case any of you are dealing with something similar.  Hopefully, it will comfort you to know that this, too, does pass.  Even though we aren’t completely out of the nightmare, I can certainly appreciate how far we’ve come after reminiscing about how terrible it used to be.

Where did you drive to and from, and how old were your kid(s) at the time?

The DC area to Dallas, TX.  Kendall was 8 weeks old.


Did you feel apprehensive about being stuck in the car with your kids for that long? What did you do about it

OMG.  Absolutely!  However, that was pretty much dwarfed by a lot of other stress factors, including moving all our possessions and 2 dogs and a cat across half the country on our own, where we would sign on our first house and move in within a day of arrival.  But, yes, I was incredibly apprehensive.  This was right around the time colic was getting really bad, and he was not calmed by the car like most colicky babies.  We had a lot of ground to cover, and I had no idea how we were going to make it work, especially since I was breastfeeding him every 2 hours.

Luckily, it ended up working just fine.   While riding in the car didn’t soothe him, the sound of static did. So anytime he started to fuss my sister and I (she was the other driver in the car while my husband drove the U-Haul) searched for a fuzzy radio station on AM and turned it up as loud as we could.  We could usually make it about 15 miles before something started to come through (oddly, lots of Polka music).  Since then, I’ve actually downloaded an MP3 of a blow drier and another of a vacuum cleaner.  I burned them to a CD (one for each car), and to this day we still play it on repeat if we need to get him settled down and to sleep, although not nearly as much as we used to.  Another factor on our side at the time is that he was still a newborn and slept a lot.  We stopped every 2 hours for me to breastfeed and change his diaper, and my husband just stayed the course with the U-Haul. This worked perfectly because we were able to cruise at 75 mph, while he was stuck doing 60.  We all ended up at our hotel each night around the same time.  If when we stopped he didn’t seem like he was going to go back to sleep, my sister or I just sat in the back with him, made funny faces, entertained him with various toys.  As long as someone was back there, he was generally pretty happy.

Wait..  I take that back.  I forgot to add that a lot of times the static alone did not do the trick, especially the first 4-5 months.  He was only soothed by very hard jiggling. Odd, I know.  So we would have to somehow try to get his infant seat to jiggle.  Oh, I am laughing right now thinking about how funny we must have looked.  My husband and I used to take turns shaking the top of his car seat to get him to sleep.  God.  That probably sounds terrible. You’re probably thinking you’re interviewing a child abuser.  I swear, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, and he seems to have retained all his brain cells.  It was the only thing that worked, I swear.  Maybe you don’t want to include that.  Moving on…


What kinds of things did you bring to entertain along the way? Was their anything that you were really glad you had?

At that age there wasn’t too much  that really caught his eye, like I mentioned before, the static is what saved us (and, really, lots of jiggling…we’ll call it jiggling because that sounds better than shaking).  However, in more recent trips I’ve found if I keep a steady rotation of toys he can chew on (he loves this Baby’s First Toothbrush, so it stays in his carseat for trips), he’s happy for a bit.  The key for us, really, is for someone to be back there.  He could have all the toys in the world, but he gets bored fast if you’re not back there (he’s still rear facing, obviously), and he’s not afraid to scream at you as you’re driving down the interstate.


What was your one best memory of the trip? Could you paint that picture for me of that wonderful memory in your head for me? (i.e. What song was on at the time? What was the scenery? What was your child saying and doing exactly?)

It was so traumatic that I think my brain has suppressed all memories 🙂 Okay, maybe not.  I think I vaguely remember at some point driving through  the mountains of Tennessee (?), the noise of static coming through on the radio with just the faintest hint of Polka music in the background (but not enough to have to find a new station yet), Kendall was peacefully sleeping and my sister and I were sharing some funny stories.  About what?  I can’t remember.  I’ve had a baby, keep in mind, and am running short on mental capacity these days.  It was a beautiful day and I was filled with excitement.  My husband and my new son and I were moving back to Texas, close to family for the first time in almost 10 years.  We had our first home awaiting us, we were on our way to our American Dream.  All our hard work had paid off, and it was well worth the three day, insanity inducing drive.


What would you do differently? The same?

Probably nothing.  There really wasn’t anything I could change.   Looking back, it seemed to work out as best it could.  If I could change the fact that Kendall had colic, I would be all over that, but, unfortunately, that’s just never an option.


Would you take another road trip with your kids?

We HAVE!  Lots.  And we will continue to do so.  Lots.  We have places to go and people to see.  I keep telling myself that one day he will like the car.  Either that or we’ll at least get to an age where he can be entertained by endless DVDs as we drive.

Kendall is 10 months, 2 weeks and 1 day old

March 17, 2009 6 comments
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BabiesThe Story

Oh, honey…I feel your pain.

by Jill June 15, 2008
written by Jill

I had to laugh a few minutes ago when I checked out my Sitemeter.  It shows me all the links that people click on that lead them here.  Most of the time it’s posts on TheNest.com or Google readers, but every now and then it will turn up a little gem like this.  See, it also shows me the specific Google searches that lead to people finding my blog via search engine.  Sometimes it’s searches for something actually rabies related, sometimes it’s for searches about cervical mucus and ovulation and crap, but this is the search that linked me up tonight –

(exact wording, capitals and all)

HOW DO I GET MY 1MONTH OLD TO STOP  SCREAMING IN THE CAR

Oh how I wish my blog held the answer for you….I really do.  Unfortunately, I think we could search the entirety of the internet and Google would never be able to help us with this predicament.

6 weeks 2 days

June 15, 2008 1 comment
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