bad mothering

Being a mother is hard. and actually sometimes it sucks.

This afternoon I spent two hours trying to get baby Barack to take his nap only for him to scream his lungs out.  I tried leaving him to cry it out and he wouldn’t stop. I went in and rocked him. nothing. fed him. nothing. burped him. nothing.

This is such a mind fcuk!   Its the most frustrating experience of my life.   Sometimes he’s been crying for almost an hour and I really don’t want to be around him.  Mzee is at work and won’t make it home for another hour and honestly all I want is a stiff cocktail, for my ear to stop ringing, and to not smell like a combination of poop, pee, and bad milk.

I finally gave up and now he’s quite happily kicking his legs and playing by himself.  He really just did not feel like sleeping.  What kind of three month old only takes one nap a day?!!

oh crap. there goes the crying again…..

On whipping out my breasts in public

So i’ve been facing a quandry that leaves me wondering how other mothers manage.

We’ll have guests at home and its time to feed baby Barack.  I sit there trying to figure out if to just whip out a boob and feed the squirming screeming baby to quiet him so I can follow the conversation, or if I should leave the room and go feed him in a private room to avoid embarassing whatever male visitors.

For a while I had decided to follow the Muslim rule whereby I would whip out a boob if the male present was related to me and go into a separate room if they were not related.  I think that doing this made my dad and father in law uncomfortable at first but they soon seemed to get over it.

For Easter we had close family friends over who also have a baby and I decided to just go ahead and feed in front of them.  That seemed to make the other mother comfortable enough so she went about pumping right there.  Both our hubbies didn’t seem to mind.  What a relief!

As I get ready to go home for a few weeks I’m wondering how to navigate this one.  I know that being gone for a while has left me a little hazy on how things are done.  Plus i’ve never had a baby in Kenya before.  So, whom to nurse in front of?

How do you mommies out there deal with this one?

boobs at work: lifted from Arnie Becker photograpy

if you liked it you should have put a bib on it!

So mzee takes baby Barack for a diaper change and a cool half an hour later he re-emerges singing and dancing with the baby singing “If you liked it you should have put a bib on it” to the tune of Beyonce’s “if you liked it you should have put a ring on it”.

Now mzee is not the singing type at all so I fall over laughing.  Why is he singing this?  Turns out that a diaper change that normally takes 5 minutes took so long because the baby kept spitting up on every outfit he was put in and there was a total of three outfits involved.  So Mzee concluded to himself that if he liked the outfit, he should have put a bib on the baby to prevent the clotted milk that soon coated every new outfit.

In honor of 30 minute diaper changes I leave you with Beyonce:

Ice Cream, you’s cream

So I never have time to do anything nowadays.  showers are a rare luxury even.

But today was special.  Today baby Barack took a long nap enough to allow me to indulge in one of my favorite things; making ice cream.  Mzee and I bonded over the project.  He cut and quartered the fresh strawberries and we chatted as I made up the recipe from thin air.

The final product was absolutely fantastic!  I ended up using very simple ingridients. Fresh strawberries, grated ginger and a dash of apple juice in the blender.  Whipping cream and sugar mixed together and slightly whipped to fold in air.  Combine  the two batches and put them in an ice cream maker for about 25 minutes and presto, fresh, homemade ice cream thats better than anything you could ever buy.  I made three batches so I can take over to people’s houses when we’re invited for meals or to serve as dessert when we have people over.  All that is assuming I don’t eat it all next week.

This new re-discovery of the ice cream machine is going to have me concocting new mixtures all summer long.  I can’t wait till all the fresh fruits come out. I saw somewhere that you can use coconut cream to make a vegan sorbet thats still creamy.  Thats my next experiment.

In the meanwhile, I’ve got containers full of strawberry ice cream to polish off. lets hear it for spring and summer!

the ice cream machine at work this afternoon