How to handle telemarketers

Since we got a home phone, most of our calls have been from telemarketers. I ignore them; Joe has fun with them. Take this exchange from the other night:

[The telephone rings.]

“Yesss! A telemarketer,” my husband cries in excitement. “Hello?”

He launches into a carefully planned monologue: “Hi, Robert?! So glad you called; we were just talking about you. Have I got a deal for you! My daughter’s selling Girl Scout cookies.”

Poor Robert. “I’m sorry?” he stuttered across the phone lines.

“We’ve got chocolate chip cookies, chocolate chunk cookies, any kind you want! They’re only a dollar a bag, and if you buy twenty, we’ll throw in some free popcorn! So, whaddya say? I want to make sure you get the best cookies, so how many boxes can I mark you down for?”

“Uh…sorry…?” Robert responded before hanging up in confusion.

“I got a telemarketer to hang up on me,” Joe told me with pride. “How rock star is that?!”

Motherhood: reflections at six weeks

I will tiptoe around a dark hotel room all morning if it means you’ll keep sleeping. It’s worth it.

I will stay awake after your 6 a.m. feeding if it means I get to shower today. It’s worth it.

I will skip showering today if the only way you’ll nap is in my arms. It’s worth it.

Even though it’s 3 a.m., I will hold you for another fifteen minutes if it means I get to stare at your sweet face a little while longer. It’s worth it.

I will nurse you for 24 hours straight if that’s what your little body needs during your growth spurt. It was worth it.

I will make up silly rhymes and sing off-key if it means you’ll enjoy getting your diaper changed. It’s worth it.

Even though you fuss and squirm right now, I will keep reading to you if it means you grow up loving books. It’s worth it.

Even though you’re all warm and snuggly and sleepy, I will let your dad take you out of my arms if it means I get to see him loving you so well. It’s worth it.

I will laugh when you spit up down my shirt if it means I’ll keep my sense of humor. It’s worth it.

I will bounce and rock and sway and swing if it means you’ll go to bed before 11 p.m. It’s worth it.

I will hold you tight and pray constantly for you if it means you’ll grow up knowing you’re loved and secure. It’s so worth it.

I will let the laundry and dishes pile up if it means I will slow down enough to cherish these moments with you. Because, baby? You’re worth it.

Travel trauma

Earlier this week, Gianna and I hit the road with Joe as he traveled to Indianapolis for work. It was a vacation for me – a hotel stay, dinners out, HGTV on cable, a good book, a hot bath and no cooking, cleaning, or laundry for two entire days!

But have you ever traveled with an infant, friends? They require a lot of stuff. I had to pack a bag for Gianna, enough diapers, wipes and burp cloths for three days, a Pack ‘N’ Play, Moby, Boppy, stroller, swaddle blankets, and sheets for the Pack ‘N’ Play – not to mention my own clothes and laptop. Plus, I had to factor in spit-up, which means taking the number of things you think you’ll need for your trip, then tripling it.

So, I packed the bags, and then I piled all that stuff in the dining room, where Joe saw the pile and laughed. It was the kind of laugh you laugh when you’re trying not to cry, I think. (He, by the way, only had to pack for himself – one bag, plus his laptop.)

It got ugly after Joe realized that his trunk would only hold the stroller and the Pack ‘N’ Play – everything else had to fit in the back seat (alongside Gianna and her car seat). I sensed a definite note of frustration in Joe’s voice on his fourth trip out of the house, still heavy-laden with luggage. I explained to him the simple gone-for-three-days-and-spit-up equation, but he was muttering under his breath too loudly to hear me.

When I walked out of the house, Joe was hunched over the back seat, trying to squeeze his suitcase into the mix.

“I can’t believe all this stuff!” he yelled in frustration. I leaned over the back seat on the other side just in time to see my box of carefully stacked diapers and burp cloths topple.

“Joe!” I shouted. “Be careful! I think everything would’ve fit fine if you’d planned a little better.”

“Did you just yell at me?!” Joe said, straightening from the back seat.

I straightened too, glaring at him over the top of the car.

“You yelled first,” I countered icily.

“Do you want to stay home?” he asked me.

“Are you threatening me?” I replied, eyes flashing. Then I added, “Do you want to unpack this car?”

I think it was my last comment that did it. No way did Joe want all his hard work to go to waste. We piled into the car, the cold silence punctuated only by the squalls of a baby, frantic to get out of her car seat.

The good news is that we were both over it before we left Zanesville – a sign of growth from our second year of marriage, I’d say. (The even better news is that Gianna soon fell asleep and slept the entire way.)

If you take one thing away from this post, let it be this simple equation: amount of stuff you think you’ll need each day x number of days you’ll be away x 3. Pack with care.

A second anniversary interview with Joe

Last year, Joe and I reflected on our first year of marriage. Here we are, reflecting on Year Two.

K: Happy second anniversary, dear. Remember, we answer honestly and I edit for content.

So, we’ve been married for two years now. What would you say is the most memorable thing about our second year of marriage?

J: Oh, wow. I didn’t know they were going to be tough questions. Definitely Gianna being born. Italy was pretty cool, too.

K; So, in 2008, we met. In 2009, we got married. In 2010, we went to Italy. In 2011, we had a baby. What should we do to make 2012 memorable?

J: Move into a new house.

K: Are you serious?

J: I mean, that would make it memorable. What are you thinking?

K: I don’t have any ideas.

J: How can you top our first three years? Seems like we just keep setting the bar higher and higher.

K: How does our second year of marriage compare to our first year of marriage?

J: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, wow. A LOT smoother.

K: I agree.

J: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

K: Last year, you said the hardest part about being married to me was that I cried a lot. I would say I cried a lot less this year. Would you agree?

J: I would agree. I concur, in fact. Do you concur?

K: Last year, you talked a lot about how sensitive I was. Have you yet developed a greater appreciation for my sensitivity? (I think you handle it better than you used to.)

J: Have I developed a great appreciation for your sensitivity? I think you’ve developed a thicker outer layer that would make me appear to have developed a greater appreciation for your sensitivity, when in fact you have become less sensitive. So in reality, you’ve grown and I haven’t.

K: I disagree.

J: I do not concur.

K: What are some of your favorite memories from the last year?

J: Oh, well, definitely Italy. Definitely our communication class and how much fun we had. Having you walk through everything with my dad was a deep memory, you know, it wasn’t exactly the best of times, but it’s a big one. And of course, bringing this beautiful baby into the world. Hey, remember that time when you were giving birth to Gianna and you smacked me?

K :Yeah, I do. But it was an accident.

K: What is one of the biggest lessons you learned this year?

J: Through marriage?

K: It doesn’t have to be. But bonus husband points if it is.

J: I think I’ve come to understand you better.

K: I think so.

J: Yeah. I concur.

K: What are your goals and hopes for the coming year, for us and for our family?

J: Well, one, I wish you wouldn’t wear socks with a nighty. Not sexy.

K: My feet were cold.

J: I’m looking forward to developing family traditions.

K: Is there anything else you want to say?

J: I love you.

K: I love you.

J: Is that the last thing?

K: Yeah.

J: Last year you grilled me.

K: Thank you for participating, baby.

J: I concur.

A marriage analogy

Joe and I are about to celebrate our second anniversary. As it approaches, I’ve been reflecting on marriage and how it differs from dating or engagement. My eye has been drawn to my engagement ring and wedding band, and an analogy has started to take shape in my mind.

When Joe proposed, he slipped a beautiful solitaire diamond on my hand. The diamond had been in his family for years. His aunt had it placed in a new setting for him when he decided to propose, so it was particularly special.

The solitaire sparkled, and I loved wearing it – not just because of its beauty, but because it signified that I belonged to Joe, and we had a future together. The engagement ring drew people’s attention – it was big and shiny, exciting and new.

Similarly, engagement was a new season. It was full of excitement and planning for the future. It was, in a sense, big and flashy – just like the ring that Joe had slipped on my finger.

When Joe and I got married on October 4, 2009, he slipped a second ring on my finger. This ring, too, contained diamonds that had been in his family. However, these four diamonds, from a watch Joe’s grandmother had worn, were much smaller than the one in my engagement ring. My wedding band is a unique design, one I’ve never seen anywhere else. It is simpler and more modest than the engagement ring, but it is beautiful.

I see parallels between these two rings and engagement and marriage. Engagement is a new and exciting season, with stomachs full of butterflies and a happy anticipation. Compared with marriage, it is a relatively brief season.

Marriage, too, is often full of excitement and newness. However, there are seasons in every marriage when the shiny newness is exchanged for the simplicity of daily life. Marriage is beautiful but, like my wedding band, is not flashy.

Sometimes I slip off my engagement ring for a few days or a week, wearing only my wedding band. I love my wedding band – not just for its beauty, but for its simplicity and symbolism as well. I wear my wedding band solo to remind me of the beauty of day-to-day life lived with my husband and partner.

How to name a baby

Although you hear about couples that argue for nine months about what to name their child, that wasn’t the case for me and Joe. In fact, we agreed on both boy and a girl names within five minutes of seeing “pregnant” on that little stick.

Even before I was pregnant Joe told me he’d always loved the name Gianna for a girl. Gianna is the Italian feminine form of John, which means “God is gracious.” I thought the name Gianna was beautiful and unique (without being weird), but I really fell in love with it when I looked up the meaning.

We  discussed a middle name off and on throughout my entire pregnancy. I felt that Gianna needed a one-syllable middle name, because both her first and last name were already three syllables each, and that seemed like quite a mouthful for a little girl. We went back and forth between the names Grace and Rose for a long time. We loved the name Grace, but Rose is a family name.

When my water broke, we drove to the hospital. As I hobbled to the door (through contractions that were already four minutes apart), I said, “Wait! Joe! We haven’t picked a middle name yet!”

“What do you want?” Joe asked me.

“Rose,” I replied decisively. It had been my frontrunner, while Joe was partial to Grace.

“Okay, Rose it is,” he agreed immediately.

And so my advice, ladies, is that if you’re struggling to agree on a name (or any issue, really), hold out until you’re in labor. Your husband will be so much more agreeable!

So, Gianna bears the promise that God is gracious, and we have prayed over and over that she would know that truth in her life. And she bears Rose, my sister’s middle name, to honor her aunt, who walks closely with the Lord. It also honors our great-grandma, for whom my sister was named. And finally, I feel that it honors my grandma (her mother’s name was Mollie Rose) and my mom, who I knew really loved and hoped we would choose Rose.

Itsy bitsy, teensy weesy

 

In the few short days since Gianna’s birth, Joe and I have gone to mush. We’ve spent hours just staring at Gianna, gushing about her perfection. I’ve also noticed that our vocabulary has changed significantly.

We talk about her tiny toesies as we squeeze her into a little bitty onesie. We ask her if she has a “burpie” after nursing, and we swaddle her tightly in a blankie. We change her poopy diapies and place her in her bassie for a nappy. Fifty percent of our vocabularly is now in the diminuitive.

Even as our vocabulary shrinks, our hearts grow larger and increase. We are over the moon about this little girl and the joy and blessing she has already brought to our lives. We pray for her and ask God for the blessings of his kingdom in her life. We imagine the possibilities for her world and her future.

Welcoming Gianna

At 3:12 a.m. on Saturday, September 3, 2011, we welcomed our precious baby girl, Gianna Rose, into the world. She weighed in at six pounds, 9 ounces.

Nearing the end of my labor, the nurse said, “Oh, she has her daddy’s hair!” That was one of the most exciting moments for us, as we knew that she was so near and would soon be in our arms.

We are so thankful, as we watched God answer every prayer we had prayed about labor and delivery, our little girl’s health and our hospital stay.

We’ve spent the week burrowed into our house, soaking up every minute with Gianna. She is, in the words of Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way.” (Truth be told, we haven’t yet found any way that she’s not perfect, but surely it’ll come…eventually…maybe in a few years…maybe when she gets her learner’s permit….)

Thank you to our family and friends for their support, and thanks to so many who have sent kind words and love our way. We are overflowing with blessing.

Making a room for baby

You know, growing a human is a fairly mindless task. I don’t mean to say that it isn’t consuming; it is – physically, mentally, emotionally. But the work of growing a baby is something that your body just does. I don’t have to sit and think, “Okay, this week we need to grow some fingernails on this baby.” It just happens.

And yet, our human selves need a way to prepare, especially for those monumental moments in our lives. When you’re a woman and you’re in a family way, they call this instinct to prepare nesting. (I’m convinced, at least based on my experience, that men have a nesting instinct as well. It just involves more power tools and heavy lifting than a woman’s instinct.)

I had a vision for the nursery as soon as I knew we were having a girl. I chose a pale green paint for the walls, and I planned to paint the nursery myself. This was partly because Joe and I didn’t have any days off together, but also because (and don’t tell him I told you this) Joe’s not a very good painter. He’s a little messy. He also doesn’t like painting, whereas I don’t mind it.

Although I did hit a moment of stress about five minutes into priming (I made an S.O.S. call to Joe: “What was I thinking? Painting is a lot of work!”), by the end of my first afternoon, I realized I didn’t really want help – from Joe or anyone else. Painting the nursery – and working on other projects since then – has become my labor of love for our little girl. It’s one of the most tangible ways I can prepare for her arrival.

My first nursery project came from one of my new favorite blogs, Young House Love. In perusing what John and Sherry did in their daughter’s nursery, I fell in love with this mobile.

I love cherry blossoms and, after using them in the mobile, they became my inspiration for the nursery: light and airy, delicate and feminine. The pink cherry blossoms paired with the green walls are just the picture of perfection to me. My talented cousin Tracy offered to do a painting for the nursery. I told her about my vision, and this is what she came up with:

It was my dream to have a gliding rocker in the room, and I found one at a yard sale for $35! It was a white glider with cushions covered in denim. I didn’t like the cushions, but I decided I could recover them. (I found the most helpful online tutorial for recovering gliding rocker cushions here.)

I also planned to make curtains for the room. I chose a solid pink that was a perfect color match with the bed set. I decided to use some leftover fabric from the cushion covers to give the curtains some added interest with a wide band at the top. I also “cheated” with the curtains. I was a little tired of sewing projects at that point, so I decided to forego traditional ruffled or tab curtains, and I used rings to hang them from the rod. (That’s another tip from John and Sherry at YHL.)

One of my favorite touches in the room is this awesome banner that my sister made. It says “God is gracious.” Our little girl’s name is Gianna, and that’s what her name means. How true it is.

The telephone: A history

I have a vivid memory of the kitchen in the old house where we lived until I was nine. It was papered in an ornate, outdated mustard-and-avocado design. Two tall windows looked into the backyard, and the kitchen table where we shared dinners was nestled between them. Most clearly, I recall the phone that hung on the wall. It was, as most phones were when I was nine, a corded phone. The cord could be stretched to about ten or twelve feet, which allowed my mom to have lengthy conversations as she prepared dinner for our family. I remember sliding my fingers up through the ringlets of the cord, and ducking under it as I entered the kitchen when Mom was in conversation.

We moved, and the phone stayed. We did have a corded phone in our new house, but it was in the basement and no one ever used it. Eventually it was removed. In our new house, all of the phones were cordless. This was a new phenomenon that allowed my mom to talk anywhere in the house – making dinner in the kitchen, folding laundry in her bedroom, even sitting outside on the patio! What a novelty.

The telephone had come a long way since the olden days when one had to turn a crank and call the operator in order to get connected to talk to someone. I wasn’t actually alive in “the olden days,” but I knew about those old phones because I used to be an avid fan of Lassie reruns. In fact, most of my telephone history comes from a Reba McEntire song from the ‘90s in which she belted out: “Back in eighteen seventy-six an old boy named Bell / invented a contraption that we know so well. / By the nineteen fifties, they’re in ev’rybody’s home. / It’s a crazy little thing they call the telephone.”

When I was in junior high, cell phones were high-tech and futuristic. And big. You only saw them in movies, and they definitely didn’t fit in anyone’s pocket. In fact, a movie created in the last two decades can be pretty accurately dated based on the size of the cell phones (not to mention the size of the characters’ hair). By late high school, several of my classmates had cell phones, and most of their parents did. I didn’t go to college with a cell phone, though. I had a corded landline – and I actually used it!

About halfway through college, my family finally subscribed to a family cell phone plan; Mom abstained, as she felt she did not need one.

Now the world is all kinds of crazy: You can check your e-mail, surf the Internet, write your blog and tweet from your cell phone. You may never have anyone’s undivided attention ever again. Land lines are a thing of the past. In fact, I can’t think of a single friend in my generation who actually has a land line. We’ve all got cell phones and the logic is simple: Why pay two phone bills when a cell phone can meet all your communication needs?

Joe and I subscribed to this logic and have always used cell phones exclusively. However, Joe recently started a new job that required us to have home internet installed. With the deal came the offer of a free home phone line with free long distance for one year. “Why not?” we said. “If we use the home phone, we can save on cell phone minutes.”

So far my mom has called twice, we’ve had two wrong numbers and two telemarketers. Most of our friends don’t even know we have a home phone number. In fact, I don’t even know my new phone number.

All of a sudden, I feel kind of archaic and outdated. Plus I feel like a loser because no one calls me (except my mom). If you want to call me at home, let me know and I’ll give you my number. I’ll just have to look it up in my cell phone first.