Had no time to make baby Barak a costume for halloween but this bat costume purchased from another mom for a measly $5 was a hit!

Oh my my my my.

I’m breathless.

I got sucked in hard!

I just got to the office at 1.30 in the afternoon after spending what was only supposed to be five minutes reading while on my morning loo visit.  Four hours later I had a serious cramp in my legs so I just crawled back in bed and continued reading.  I can’t stop.  I can’t help myself.  Yesterday I went to the library and checked the book and its sequel out.  I thought there is no way I’m going to plough through these in the time I have before they are due.  Well, I’m almost done with the first tome and salivating at the sequel.  I didn’t get to sleep until 4am this morning.

The culprit: Twilight

OMG!!!!

I first saw the movie on a flight to Kenya this summer and I was completely drawn in.  With reading the book now, I’m officially a Twihard.  Yep, a Twilight diehard

O.k. hurriedly catching up with work thats urgently due so i can run home and read some more.

Whats come over me?!!

Any other fans out there?

I”m so sick and tired of everyone finding mud to fling at Obama.  At once he is doing too much and changing everything too fast, and for others he is not doing enough to undo Bush damage.  And about all those saying the Nobel Prize is premature: WTF?!!

1. There have been other sitting presidents to be awarded the prize

2. Start your own prize so you can give it to who you see fit

3. Obama has already accomplished much in terms of changing the general direction of U.S.policy!

Heck, at this rate i might even consider taking on U.S. citizenship for how much I love the man.

O.k. so its been forever since i’ve blogged. I’ve been debating whether to abandon the venture alltogether or keep going. You can see the decision i’ve made
I love my blogthren and its a good release.

what have i been up to?
Peanut is now almost 9 months old!

I’m back at work this semester and paying the unspoken price of going on maternity leave for 8 months.  Project A is going fantastically and Mzee still comes home to me at night

I’ve also developed a healthy addiction to harlequin romance novels!
These things are porn for girls.  The well sculpted male specimen, the lusty protagonist, the romance, the sex…..

Its all contributing to a happy Mzee is all I can say

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…..

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

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:

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

I swear I don’t know where my days are going!!

I  had all these brilliant ideas about all these things I would be able to accomplish once I was home on maternity leave.  Well, projects are still on the shelf waiting for me.  Ati I even thought i’d have time to put together some scrap books.  Yeah right!

I can’t figure out where all my time is going.  I had no idea taking care of a baby took this much time.  I barely have time to check email let alone write people back.  And blogging is such an indulgence nowadays!!

oh and lets talk about showers…. I used to think its a joke those women who would complain about not having time to take a shower.  Kumbe its true!  As soon as I put baby Obama to nap and step into the shower he wakes up and start wailing.  There I am, all soaped up and debating to let him keep screaming and rinse off, or create a sudzy puddle all the way to his crib and try and calm him down.  It was funny the first two times.  After the third time it gets old.

Much as i’m miffed at how little time I have for myself I have to admit i’m quite proud of myself and the little guy for how much he’s grown.  He’s put on close to 4lbs in 9 weeks and has those chubby cheeks babies get.  I marvel that all this is from drinking my milk and my milk only!

And as i’m typing this he’s swaddled in bed right next to me completely refusing to take his nap and just smiling and cooing at me instead. It warms my heart.  What a cutie…….I”m smitten

Seriously, WT?!!!!

While I admire people who act out of moral or religious conviction, I’m dumbfounded by the Pope flying all the way to Africa to tell us to stop using condoms!!

I wonder if we’re going to see a spike in HIV rates as a result of his urging.

grrrrrrrr