The Saturday Shower earns those caps for relaxation services offered. It’s a proper noun in my books, not because I only shower on saturdays — I still manage to shower every day — but because it has become my self-indulgent ritual of the highest order. And, yes, I’m a Momma, so it still only takes 30 minutes.

Every other day of the week, my shower is a 10 minute rinse, squeezed in while my husband feeds the Bean cereal and fruit, just minutes before he runs out the door for his office.

On Saturdays, I take my time. I have a long floss session. I touch up the ol’ eyebrows, which by this time have aggressively colonized in the direction of my eyelids. I trim my nails. I shave, legs and underarms. And, I linger. Enjoying the hot water. The quiet. The solitude. And just thirty minutes later I emerge from the steamy bathroom feeling a little more prepared for the week ahead.

It’s not that my responsibilities for the Bean have dramatically undercut my beauty routine. The truth is that I never had one. Make-up was — and still is — confined to special occasions. So much so that it tends to last me a decade, which is probably not good for my skin but is easy on my wallet. My hair sometimes gets a blow dry, sometimes not. And, flossing, well, there’s always room for improvement, right?

I hadn’t yet understood the restorative power of these personal rituals. I wanted to go through the hygienic steps, look presentable enough, and get on with my day. Maybe it’s the motherhood that’s changed me. Maybe it’s just the effect of aging. Whatever the root cause, I’m learning to love spending time on my body and its presentation. I’m not saying that I all-of-a-sudden want to become a beauty queen, but I’ll certainly be less silently derisory of fancy ladies and lads in the future.

And, I’ll be looking forward to the small indulgence of the Saturday Shower. After which I will look great, until the next dollop of spit up comes my way.

I have a love-on for art prints, especially the cute ones designed with kids in mind.

Tiny Us takes kiddo art prints to the next level — you get a warm fuzzy feeling from the whimsical art and a warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that you’re helping a good cause.

It works like this:

1. Make a donation of any amount 

2. Download your art file

It’s that easy. Proceeds are donated to Presence, an educational institute for mentally-challenged children.

For more information on the school, the Tiny Us project, and to purchase some feel-good art, visit www.tiny-us.com.

Stacked together, my September archive is as thin as a playing card. It’s been hard to find the motivation to write, because I am exhausted.

The afternoons — my traditional blogging time — have been given over to the Bean, now that his Dad is back at the office. In the evenings, there are all the regular chores added to the slow unpack of moving into a new house. Free time is often allocated to online shopping for all the missing items we need for the new place. Or to sleep, my God, I need sleep.

For the first few days, Jake did great…then it fell apart. He’s been waking every hour or so. Every night, all night. It’s hard to pin down the origin of the disturbance: new country, new apartment, his own room for the first time, this room has a light and a banging bike shed door outside the window, he’s just started solids, and he’s grown an inch in the last three weeks. Any or all of these factors could be contributing to his sleep disruption.

Add to that the cold I’ve been fighting, with a raw throat, and, well, I’m not much on blogging these days. I keep hoping that the writing bug will bite me.

Hopefully, I’ll feel rested enough to tackle the keyboard again soon because, boy, do I have a sitcom-worthy poop story to share!

A lot has happened since my last blog entry. We changed countries and continents, started feeding the bean solids, fried a breast pump that wasn’t ready for UK wattage, and I got my first smartphone. But probably the biggest thing, as far as I’m concerned, was discoveringThe Lorax.

Maybe I read it as a kid, but I have no recollection of it. The point of it would have been lost on me in any case (refer to previous blog re; growing up in disposables). But I read it now and it gets me stirred up, way more than When Elephants Weep or other equally compelling books reminding us to be better to the planet.

For those who don’t know, The Lorax is a Dr. Seuss poem about the devestation a thneed factory wreaked on a forest of Truffula trees and its inhabitants. The factory’s owner, the old Once-ler, seems to be a decent enough guy just trying to make his way. The point of this post isn’t, as it were, to re-flog my environmental guilt; rather, it’s to remind everyone out there about the depth of Dr. Seuss.

And it doesn’t stop with The Lorax, either. Dr. Seuss’s work won two academy awards. One was for a documentary about Japanese culture in the post WWII era; the other was for Gerald McBoing-Boing. That’s what I call range. I recommend to anyone reading the Wikipedia entry on this guy to lay out some plastic sheeting first, to make it easier to clean up after your mind gets blown.

And remember Green Eggs and Ham? It’s a story about my dad (and other, similar dudes). Push them far enough and they’ll admit to liking new things… but it takes effort. We all know Oh the places you’ll go, but it deserves mention among the classics too. Rachel said the other day that she wishes she read more books since the baby, but I think I’m getting to the heart of good literature these days.

With that being said, I’m still trying to find the sophisticated subtext of Hop on Pop. But I’m sure it’s there…

I’ve got a bad case of firsts fever.

Having failed at religiously keeping a baby book, I’ve taken to plugging Jake’s developments into my iPhone calendar. Lately, the days have become crowded with firsts. Not first words or steps, rather ‘first time out in the world wearing shoes’ and ‘first time touching grass with his bare toes’; ‘first time in swim trunks’ and ‘first time on a beach’ (a gravel-ly one and a disaster).

Things took a turn towards the noteworthy on Sept. 4th, according to my trusty calendar. Jake had his first taste of solid food. And then his second, third, and fourth. He loved the watermelon so much that we had to prepare another hunk before removing each slice from his grip.

Many reliable experts claim that a baby’s first solid food should be cereal or that, at the very least, you should introduce vegetables before fruit to avoid a sweet tooth. I’d planned on following all this advice. Then we found ourselves at the cottage, with a watermelon and a jealous-looking kid. I worried about having ruined him, momentarily. He, and we, were having way too much fun to care about the rules and regulations of feeding babies. Besides, if you’ve ever tasted breastmilk — which I totally have — you’ll know that chances are pretty good a breastfed baby’s got a sweet tooth already.

Since then, Jake’s been weathering non-stop major firsts: first time on a plane (a transatlantic flight, at that), first time in a foreign country, first move to a new house, first night sleeping in his own room, first week without a visit from his grandparents. In short, first time living overseas.

Turns out this little guy is a ringer. He’s survived packing/unpacking, customs lines, and days packed with paperwork and administrative tedium. An utter champ, he’s smiling and laughing more than ever, and continues to sleep through the nights. Bless his brave little soul, he’s unwittingly accomplished a major transition with style.

In addition to reminding Jake how awesome he is when tackling the big changes, I’ll be keeping tabs on the little stuff. Let’s raise a glass to his first time being driven on the left side of the road!

Jake has taken to sticking his fingers in the tap when we bath him in the sink. It’s great for us, because to him it’s the most enthralling thing in the world. In the past, when I went for the neck cheese wipe, he would fuss like I was stealing parmigianno reggiano from his neck folds.  Now, he’s focused on the water and the tap. So I started to wonder if he was actually Poseidon, god of the sea, reincarnated into my baby’s body, but too young to wield his powers. In his head he’s going, “Water, I command you to spray the other guy in the room”, and when it fails, he just tries harder, like a Fanboy trying to use the Force for the trillionth time.

But I digress. Watching Jake try to control the water made me think about how much water we use now, relative to our use in the Pre-Bean Era (colloquially PBA).  I wash my hands all the time. Plus, I thoroughly wash and rinse his bottles daily, and we’ve taken to using a dishwasher to save effort, which (even though our Kenwood is energy-star certified) is definitely blasting out more water than our previous dish-by-hand method. We do at least one load of laundry a day, and don’t even talk to me about diapers. The cloth discussion lasted less than zero seconds. It reminds me of this old joke:

Q: How do you spell ‘way’?
A: W-A-Y
Q: Is there an “f” in “way”?
A: No, there’s no f in way

Some days, I feel like, if I had grown up in cloth diapers, I would feel a bit of moral superiority over other kids, and would say things like, “Oh, yeah, my folks used cloth diapers. Do you know how long diapers last in landfills?”  But I was raised on disposables, and the Bean will share this fate. He will feel like, through no fault of his own (whose fault is a poop?), he will have hurt the planet just a little (maybe a lot, though I don’t intend to let him know how many diaper genie refills we went through). 

Notwithstanding my guilt complex, I’ll say this. If there is a special section in heaven for people who use cloth diapers, I’m willing to forego entry to this VIP room on cloud 10. And to all you who manage to pull it off, you don’t have to wonder about it. You are simply better than I am. Some days, Rachel and I talk about making a donation to a charity that re-claims landfill space, and sometimes that takes the edge off.

We’re moving from Canada to England in less than two weeks so I can finish my PhD, and I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about finding work. This international student thing costs a serious amount of Canuckistan coin, and I’ve got the equivalent of a small condo to pay off at the end of this learning extravaganza. And for whatever reason, this week I’ve been sweating it.

Thinking about the state of the economy sends me into a serious rabbit hole these days, although thankfully I have a tiny goon to barf on me and remind me to focus. Under the best of circumstances, I’m hazy on what another person’s motivation would be to hire a doctor of social sciences. I can’t help but feel like a bit of a luxury item sometimes.

Normally, my mentality is Stuart Smalley about my life decisions (good enough, smart enough, and so on). But a few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who is a DINK (double income no kids), homeowner, just got married, and is in a much more promising line of work than I am.  And he said something like, “We just can’t afford kids right now.” Seriously? What’s the level below “can’t afford”?

Once we leave Canada, we check off the grandparent gravy train. We’re moving to a place where you have to give people money for babysitting. We’re going to have to buy our own car and pay rent. No one will show up with books and toys for Jake, just because. In other words, we’re going to live the way most other parents live.

We knew that this kid wasn’t going to boost our bank account (even though I tell him to get a job almost every day). But he does a great job of keeping us smiling and forcing us to make good on all the promises we made to the ether long before he arrived.

Have you noticed something missing from my blog? All the pictures of Jake have been removed. Also gone, but less obviously so, is my internet innocence — or should I write, naivety.

Not long after I started this blog, my dear Mother asked, “Aren’t you worried about putting Jake’s picture on the internet?” Being throughly used to posting my own misadventures to facebook and loving to disagree with my Mom, I replied, “Not really.” After all, there are tons of parent blogs out there. How dangerous could it be? (Withhold your laughter or scorn. I’ve learned my lesson.)

Only a day or two later, I came across a story about stolen baby identities. Apparently, there are actually folks out there who download photos of other peoples’ babies (or stock photography) and then post them to their own blogs, claiming that they are their kids. WTF. 

In direct response to this story, I started watermarking my photos. I can’t afford digital watermaking, so I make the mark big enough to cover some part of Jake’s face (can’t be easily cropped away). I thought that this would provide us with some protection from the imposter-weirdos. There would certainly be easier targets.

Since the blog has been an important creative outlet for me and a fantastic opportunity to connect with other parents — some old friends, some new — I kept right on posting. Pictures too.

But I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

Several days ago, alongside my post about activity envy, I added a photo of my husband and son taking a nap, both fast asleep with their arms up over their heads. Underneath the image was the simple caption: This rocks my world. And, it does.

Later that night, sleepless, I decided to feed my Tumblr addiction instead of snacking in front of the TV. I discovered that the picture of my sleeping boys had been reblogged to a site with pornographic images. I felt physically ill.

In a move that my husband qualifies as an overreaction, I immediately deleted every photo of Jake from my blog. I know that the internet is like pissing in a pool. The photos I’ve posted are out there now, even if I’ve taken them down, but I felt like I needed to do something.

I also wrote to Tumblr and, to their credit, they’ve removed my picture from the offending blog. I guess this means mostly ‘no harm, no foul’ but the experience has left a bad taste in my mouth. The taste of guilt, I suppose. I feel responsible for opening our little family up to the filth.

Since this mini porn-gate, I haven’t been motivated to write. (That, and it’s been a busy week including having a mole removed — it’s hard perch the laptop on my belly, when there’s a neat line of stitches across it.)

I hope that I rediscover my will to write. In addition to connecting with other parents, this blog is a valuable record. I know in 5/10/15 years, I’ll be grateful that I captured our experience as new parents.

At least for the time being, it’ll be a written record. Not an illustrated diary.

Go ahead, Mom, tell me, “I told you so.”

Check out the http://thekidshouldseethis.com.

It’s a fantastic new Tumblr blog filled with science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and other good stuff for kids.