Ice cream cake as weapon

At 5:32 p.m. today, when the sky darkened over your home and the earth groaned and creaked ominously, I officially turned 29 years old. My first thought on the matter is that I was 19 when I started dating Big K, which is nothing other than a fun factoid that makes me feel old. My second thought on the matter is that I don't really have another thought on the matter. When your baby is 13 days old, you don't do much wild rocking out of the birthday.

Now, if I remember correctly, at least the first 6 months or so of this blog are very boob-centric, because I was about 90% occupied by nursing Phook during that time period, and there is a lot of angst/mayhem/hilarity that goes along with the breastfeeding scene. Here I am again, and I sense this blog may return to its boob-tastic origins. Circus is a great nurser, no problems to speak of in the mechanics department...not a crack, not a blister, not even a wince of pain...all systems are go. But like his sister, he is a mad suckling pig.

Looking back at those early months with Phook, I thought I must have done something to turn her into a wild mad nurser, and that I could somehow head off that trend if I went into this thing the second time around with a little more knowledge and, well, planning, as far as his feeding was concerned. It turns out that my plans to try to get him on some kind of a routine very early in the game have been, thus far, thwarted entirely by the whims of his mad desires to suckle even when freshly fed, followed by utter rejection of a pacifier and loud, rooting protests of insistence that he is utterly starved, followed by long bouts of contentedly not eating, followed by futile attempts to keep him awake to get a full meal down his gullet in an attempt to prevent snacking behaviors. I might as well spend the day attempting to get the wookiees in my bathtub drain on some kind of eating routine. I don't know if your babies rock out this way, but it turns out that mine do, even when I'm not going into it all blind and stupid. Circus' stomach is the boss of me. At least for now.

Essentially, I'm leading up to the point where I tell you something about my birthday. We went over to my parents' house for my annual spaghetti-a-thon birthday dinner, and all was good in the world. I ate a lot. I stepped on their scale and confirmed my suspicions that I am a couple pounds south of my "when I got pregnant" weight, and laughed at the metabolic karma that is my pregnany-as-weight-watchers game plan. (Really, people, it's not worth hating on me or flaming me for this. I haven't weighed less than 200 pounds since 1998, and at my own pinnacle of personal fitness, which would be constant participation in high school athletics at age 17, I weighed 185. And no, I'm not kidding. I'm living proof that is possible to be the two bill girl and not get anywhere near qualifying for a gastric bypass. For the record, I do plan to be 199 this calendar year, if not next week, and I promise I'll let you know when it happens, because it's gonna be an occasion for celebration.)

So anyhow, we had supper. And then Circus wanted his 4th supper, so I hooked him up. And then my mom and sister presented me with the sweet ass neapolitan ice cream cake they'd made for my birthday. This involved neapolitan ice cream, smashed up oreos, and chocolate sauce. A delightfully messy disaster. So I'm now attempting to eat this cake with the wrong hand while nursing Circus. And my lap has become a particularly delightful spot for Phook to land upon since Circus also started spending time there. And that goes double when momma is housing ice cream cake. So I've got a baby on the boob, a (coincidentally naked) toddler climbing all over my lap stealing bites of cake, and I'm attempting to shovel messy, melting cake into my own maw with my left hand. I'm trying to get this big gooey bite in my mouth. One minute it was on my fork heading toward my mouth. The next moment it was gone. I looked all over my lap, the chair, Phook, Circus, everyone. And I figured I must have just sleep-deprivationally hallucinated some part of the exchange and there was really no missing cake. I continued with the balancing of children and cake and three-pronged feeding.

A few minutes later, Circus popped off the boob. And then I saw the error of my ways. The giant forkful of cake had slipped into the crevice between Circus' chin and chest, slid down his cheek and neck and shirt, and landed somewhere to the southwest of the charming car patch adorning his onesie. My own boob was also well-slimed with cake. In his rooting, he had managed to spread the original cake blob, which was really not cake so much as melted ice cream and chocolate sauce, over the entire southern hemisphere of his face. And, I can only assume, he also managed to ingest some portion of the goodness. I screamed for mopping devices and began attempting to deal with the mayhem I had created on account of my own cake-eating negligence. Circus was changed, my offspring and I were tenderly swabbed with mountains of wet paper towels, and order was ultimately restored.

There were times after I had Phook that I wished I was an octopus so I could tend to all her needs while also occasionally tending to my own. Eventually, I got better at one-handing formerly two-handed tasks and my feet became more dextrous, and I eventually became one of those women who walks along picking things up with her toes, flinging miscellaneous items up and catching them so absentmindedly that she doesn't even know she is doing it. Now I'm feeling like I'm out of limbs whose capabilities can be fine-tuned, and I'm having those octopus fantasies again. I've got an assembly-line approach down for double diaper duty, but what I really need is a better system for feeding three people simultaneously. Anyone? Anyone?