Don’t worry about it.

Seriously. I started worrying pretty much the second I found out I was pregnant (am I gaining enough weight? What does that pain mean? Am I gaining too much weight? Is he going to be born with both legs fused together? Did all that kicking dislocate one of my ribs?) and it only ramped up from there.

First there was the milk situation, and the fact that mine took like 4 days to come in and the lactation people were making me feel really, really bad about it, like I was deliberately starving my baby or something (note to lactation consultants: I would tell you to suck it but you’d probably take it the wrong way).

Then there were the milestones that did not correspond with established charts: clapping (oh, how I worried about the clapping), jumping, talking.

We got walking out of the way relatively early, what with the taking his first steps at 8.5 months, but he didn’t really talk until well after he was 2 and still has some trouble with pronouns. And I think I may have mentioned how worried I was about potty training (but we all know how that turned out).

But for all my fretting and teeth-gnashing and late-night scouring of the internet, the kid did just fine. He reached all his milestones when he was ready to reach them, with relatively little input from me. It’s like – gasp! – I don’t have total and complete control over my child’s development! It’s like things happen when they happen no matter how much I worry about them!

He might not be reading super early like some of his friends, or drawing recognizable pictures like other friends, but I’m not going to worry about it. My kid is who he is, and I can’t imagine him any other way.

Except maybe he could eat more. That would be okay.

• We’ve actually started going to the gym! A leading motivator is the fact that they have kick-ass childcare which Ellison LOVES. He begs to be taken to the gym. It’s cute. (Related things that are kicking asses, namely mine: pilates. Ow ow ow.)
• Ellison got into preschool! SO EXCITED OMG. He starts in the fall. I may or may not be marking off days on the calendar.
• The kid continues to be potty trained, and this continues to amaze me. (Though I have not brought him to Ikea yet.)
• Matt landed a book deal with PeachPit and we’re in the process of writing the next Visual QuickStart Guide for WordPress. Woot!
• I’ve got two spanky new work projects that should be really fun and now I will stop talking about work because this is my personal blog damnit and I can totally talk about other things, right? Right?
• Uh…
• I like donuts.

I can now use the childcare center at IKEA.

(Honestly, it was the first thing that occurred to me when we realized he was potty trained. But I have yet to do it, since they’re remodeling. Remodeling! Damn them and their delicious meatballs!)

On a larger scale, we can actually actively consider sending the kid to preschool, the thought of which fills me with a giddy sort of glee. Not that I don’t enjoy spending every second of every day with a small child climbing on me and yanking or poking some portion of my anatomy, but since I’m usually trying very, very hard to get some work done during those seconds, I think the kid is often bored. I’m a firm believer in boredom as parenting device, mind you, but I also like the idea of the kid learning to play nicely with other children his own age and listen to authority figures who aren’t his parents. Plus he’s seriously awesome, and why would I want to keep that all to myself?

So, we’re looking. Preschool hasn’t even been on my radar, so I have no idea if other parents are reading this and laughing hysterically at the idea of me thinking I can just waltz in and enroll my kid all willy-nilly. Go ahead, laugh. I can’t hear you over the sound of my own denial.

Yes. You read that right. He potty trained himself.

About two weeks ago, Ellison announced that he wanted to use the potty. Nothing new; he’d been doing that periodically for months, but last time I hunkered down and tried to get him to use it reliably resulted in nothing but soiled underpants and tears. So, sure, he used the potty, and then I went to put his diaper on and he was like “No! No diaper!”

Okay. So I let him wear some big-boy underpants, thinking what the hell, we don’t have to be anywhere.

And he wore them all day. And didn’t have any accidents.

And then his diaper was dry in the morning. And he wore underpants all that day, too.

And then all of the next night.

And it’s been two weeks.

DUDE. If I had known potty training would be this easy I would never have stressed out about it. This parenting thing is a piece of cake.

I mention this because today Ellison’s breath smells like rubbing alcohol, and I foresee nothing but doooooom. (Though it does explain yesterday’s foray into Meltdown City, in which a sobbing tantrum was thrown every five minutes or so by my normally cheerful kid.) We all had the flu a couple of weeks ago & are only just now getting back to normal; the last thing I want is another illness! But the kid’s got a fantastic immune system and usually kicks whatever bug he gets pretty quickly. Mommy and daddy, though, are another story…

Whatev. It’s cute, even if it isn’t what I wanted. Also (and you can’t see this in the photo) it’s still blue, which is happy-making. It’s fading in an entertaining way, and the bleachy bits mean that I can add fun colors without having to do any real work, and isn’t that what everyone wants from their hair?

Speaking of scones, I’ve had this problem lately wherein everything I try to bake turns out horribly. Not just run-of-the-mill so-you-say-you-can’t-bake horribly, but like “Um, are you sure you actually measured all the ingredients?” horribly. To wit: the chocolate chip cookies which I have made before without incident and are supposed to be flat and delicious came out puffed and dry. I have to use almost twice the amount of liquid called for in my tried-and-true scone recipe, which is just weird, since I make those all the freaking time. I can only think that it must have something to do with the flour I’m using, except that when I tried using different flour the same thing happened. So my new theory is that my oven is possessed. Anyone know where I can get an oven exorcism on the cheap?

So here’s a thing: apparently the “many” cysts that showed up on the sonogram in New York have turned into two little book-end cysts, one in each ovary. Good news, right? Except for the part where they still cause me excruciating pain once a month, yes!

So no surgery for me; it seems that my body is well on the way to reabsorbing the cysts. KaiserDoc suggested going on the Pill for a few months so I wouldn’t ovulate; I explained that the Pill makes me crazy (bad-crazy, not fun-party-time crazy) and besides, wouldn’t that pretty much put the kibbosh on the whole second-kid question? We went back-and-forth for a bit, her saying “…or we could just do nothing” and me going “Um, PAIN,” punctuated by her leaving for ten minutes to take a phone call, which – professional! But what it came down to was that I’m not entirely comfortable with playing Russian roulette with my hormones, especially when there’s no guarantee it’s going to work.

KaiserDoc was reasonably sympathetic, in the way you sympathize with the crazy lady on the bus who tells you she’s misplaced her tinfoil hat. And speaking of crazy: I said maybe there was some magic combo of hormones and anti-depressants that might just mitigate some of the crazy, and KaiserDoc sort of jumped on that, giving me a delightful run-around about how she can’t recommend any one thing or combination of things because “everyone reacts differently” (which: OBVIOUSLY, but maybe as a DOCTOR you have SOME IDEA of which BCPs are most compatible with the chronically depressed, since I am REASONABLY CERTAIN I am not the first person in the world to be in this position) finally saying “Well, let’s just start you on Prozac and then re-visit the birth control pill idea after a few months.” So, basically: take some pills and quit being a crazy person, and then get back to me. Nice.

I’m not saying I shouldn’t be on meds, but, dude. Way to play up every stereotype of an insurance-company run health care conglomerate, KaiserDoc! Perhaps you can also sign me up for the newsletter – oh. You did. Right, thanks for that.

She did give me some Vicodin, too. So now I can be really high and also in pain. Yay!

Yeah, that’s about what I thought.

I’m debating making my graphics into PNGs, because GIFs are lame and full of lameness, but there’s the whole “IE can’t handle PNG transparency” thing* and it just makes me sad to think of poor backward IE people, looking at my site and going “Why did she put all her graphics in white boxes?”.

But who is thinking of me in this scenario? No one, that’s who.

I could check my stats, but that would be too easy. Plus it doesn’t involve ticky boxes.

Fill out a survey! You know you want to.

(If you can’t get the pop-up to load, click here.)

*Yes I know there are hacks, but I’m allergic to javascript & refuse to ask Not So for help. SUCH IS THE STORY OF MY LIFE. I do the same thing when I need to rearrange furniture.