Time has gotten away from me again. I feel like I should do penance. "It has been 21 days since my last blog post." Except I'm an atheist, not Catholic.

Michaela is teething. She has 3 teeth all the way through the gums and two more that have poked through. There are lots more right behind them.

She is pulling herself up like crazy. She always wants to be standing. ALWAYS. If not standing, then moving. She can do what I call a "big girl crawl," but she's faster at army crawling, so she usually does that.

A friend of mine has a son, S., who is like a little monkey. He is two weeks older than Michaela and has been on the verge of walking for some time. I was talking to his mom today and Is aid something about having some time before Michaela walks and she was like, "oh yeah, you have lots of time." She didn't mean it in a mean way, but my competitive hackles were raised. I know babies do things on their own schedule, but dude. Then I comfort myself with the knowledge that Michaela has more teeth than S.

So tomorrow will be the last day I take the pill. I'm going to go off it and we'll start using condoms when we have sex. Which continues to be practically never. I have no interest in sex. As I've expressed her, I'm not sure how much of that is hormonal and how much of it is my connection with Mike. He got really mad at me yesterday and just totally blew up. Now that he's gotten it out, it's better, but whenever that happens, it always puts me on a path of thinking, "hmm, do I want to stay married? Should we get divorced? What's best for Michaela?"

My job is going very well. I have this nagging sensation that when my boss is out on maternity leave, I'm not going to get promoted to fill her spot. My prediction is that I'll get some sort of temporary promotion-- VP of Communications, maybe (instead of SVP) and a small raise. I think I'll probably take on a lot of her work, but not the management part of it, and if I had to guess, I'd say I'd start reporting to the chief of staff. So we'll see.

One of my coworkers, who I've become really close to, goes out on maternity leave next Wednesday. I'm really going to miss her. And not only because I'm totally freaked out about how much of her work I'm going to have to pick up while she's gone.

Both of our apartments are rented out. Hopefully it will stay that way. One of our tenants is in the Navy. He's a low-level grunt and he was only allowed to live off-ship because he was married. Now he and his wife are getting divorced and it's only a matter of time before the Navy figures that out. He's supposed to ship out to the Middle East in about a month. I'm hoping she will get shipped out and they won't make him move out until he's back (7 months later). That'd mean no tenant (yeah, quiet! plus, we could do some renovations in there which would make the place more marketable next time it goes on the market) but rent money, and then we'd be looking to rent it out during a good time to advertise vacancies. Fingers crossed!

Michaela's daycare is going well. It's not like she can talk about it, but I trust the provider and know she's in good hands. That's a big relief. The provider has another day open, so Mike and I need to talk about if we want to take it and have Michaela go to daycare three days a week. I happen to feel like that would be good, but Mike doesn't seem to. (What shock, we disagree on something.)

My mom is doing okay. She's been really tired lately. Not sure why. And of course she won't go to the doctor. I haven't heard anything about how her social security disability case is coming. Don't know if that means they denied her or if there hasn't been word, or what. She's not a very active participant, so whenever I suggest she call her attorney to find out what the fuck is going on, she blows me off.

Have I mentioned that I recently have been feeling like I don't want to get pregnant again? I was thinking we could start trying this fall, but now I am in a "not so much" kind of place. I feel like Michaela is so perfect and so special and so wonderful, I couldn't ever do any better. Also, she's so awesome, I want to spend all my time with her and give her all my attention. Of course, that's very selfish. The unselfish part of me says, "but what about the special bond siblings share? You want her to have that!" And I do.

Mike and I had a big fight about it, about 4 seconds after Michaela and I got home from visiting my best friend in Chicago. I told him the above, plus if we do decide to have another one, I'd ideally like to have at least a month where my body is my own. You know, where I'm not breastfeeding anyone and I'm not gestating anyone. He doesn't understand that. He told me I hated being pregnant and that he would be happy to adopt. I told him I didn't want to adopt, he asked why. I said because if we're going to have another kid, I want it to be my kid. We agreed not to talk about it for a while. Sigh.

Chicago was awesome. Michaela came down with a double ear infection. Not good. We put her on antibiotics about 4 days before we flew and it seemed to clear up the infection. She did great no the flights and we had a nice time, though she did get my friend's twin daughters sick. Oops. I guess that's life with kids.

So yeah. Things are mostly good. Except for the drama with Mike (which most of the time actually isn't drama, it's more like having a roommate), I have no complaints.

September

Somewhere along the line, I went from the mother of a baby to the mother of an infant. It's really amazing. I'm not sure how it happened. Michaela is 9 months old now and she's just the coolest kid. She's super curious about things. She loves animals. She loves the wind in her hair. She loves her grandma (my mom). Whenever we go to my mom's house, Michaela gets the HUGEST smile and always laughs. It's tremendously sweet.

And she's pulling herself up now. I put a magazine on our bar-height chair and next thing I knew, Michaela's army crawled over to the chair, pulled herself up, pulled the magazine off the chair, laid back down on the floor, and begun playing with the magazine. She loves the crinkly sound the paper makes.

She likes to pull herself up on people, too. And the daycare lady says that she's starting to figure out the toys there, and which ones make noise.

Meanwhile, Michaela aside, I'm doing well, too. Work is going great. I really like my job, though it sometimes feels like a bit much. Most of the time, it doesn't. And that's pretty cool. I relish the flexibility of my job. I can take time off in the middle of the day to do fun stuff, or work in my bathrobe all day, or work from Starbucks. That rocks. My boss is pregnant and she's asked me if I would be okay with her floating the idea to our CEO of my taking over for her while she's out on leave. She says she thinks I'd do a great job and that she talked to the Chief of Staff, who also thinks I'd be great at it. That would mean I'd be "acting senior vice president" and get a temporary pay raise. Lord knows the money would be fabulous to have. That would help us build up our new house down payment fund even quicker.

And that has become an increasing priority for me. I love our house. LOVE IT. But the schools that are near us are just awful. I can't send Michaela there. We have lots of options to get her out of here, but it's more than just the school. It's also wanting to be in a neighborhood where Michaela can have friends, and where she can have more space to play. Our house now doesn't have much by way of yard. Actually, it doesn't have any yard for her to play in now, because even our backyard is dirt and native plants, not grass. But buying a house in San Diego is expensive, so we need to be diligent savers. I'm trying to buckle down and cut our food costs, because that's one place where we spend a ton of money. But other things keep coming up, like trips.

We've booked a vacation in late October/early November. We'll be taking a cruise with Michaela, and Mike's mom and stepdad. Should be fun. We've actually done this cruise before, but on a different ship. It'll be interesting to see how it goes with a baby on board...

Monday is our two year wedding anniversary. Time has flown by. On the one hand, it feels like we've been married forever. We've been together 6 years now, and in our house for 3. On the other hand, it feels like we just got married. And here we are with a 9 month old. Crazy.

Being a mom is awesome. I love it. I'm so glad, because I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it. Mike is totally ready for #2. I'm not. I would like to have a little bit of time to myself, body-wise. That is to say, I'm still pumping for Michaela. So my body isn't my own right now. And if I get pregnant, I'll be hosting that child and then having to pump again. That could mean 3 years straight of having someone else dependent upon my body. All I'm asking for is a month or two to be... alone. Alone isn't the right word, but you know what I mean.

The other thing that is sort of interesting is that lately I've been on the fence about having a second baby. I love Michaela so much. I'm not sure another baby would be as perfect as she is. I'm not sure I want to share her with anyone else. I'm not sure I want to share myself with anyone else. I don't worry I wouldn't love #2, because I know I would, I just feel a little sad when I think about Michaela not being the center of our lives anymore. Although it's probably good for her to not be the only one, and I have always thought it is important to have 2 kids so they can have shared experiences and family once Mike and I pass on. So I don't know. Never thought I'd feel this way. I guess that's motherhood for ya!

Next week, Michaela and I are flying to Chicago to see my best friend. She had twins a few months ago. This will be the first time I've gotten to meet them, and it'll be the 2nd time BFF has gotten to see Michaela. I am super excited to meet her girls and to get to see her and to hang out and spend time in Chicago. It's going to be weird to be together as moms. Our routine used to be getting together and drinking and going clubbing. Or dorking out and playing board games. But now we're going to be pumping and changing diapers and all that jazz. So different!

I'm a little nervous because Michaela and I are going by ourselves. So I'll have to make it through the airport and through the flight (which has a stop in the middle, though we don't change planes) by myself with the baby. I'm going to wear her, though, and take an umbrella stroller, I think, so that should help from a schlepping things around perspective. Also, Michaela apparently has an ear infection (her first, though that's not the type of first I want to celebrate). The doctor said it is a minor one, and that as long as she doesn't spike a fever, it should go away by itself, but I'm concerned about how it will react with the up and down altitude change and pressurization of the plane ride. I emailed the pediatrician and she suggested we come back in to get it looked at now that it's been about a week, so we go in on Monday. Worse case, she can't fly and I need to stay home (Mike is going to Denver to get an award from his alma mater and to speak on a panel there). 2nd worst case, Michaela needs to go on antibiotics. If that's the case, hopefully her starting them on Monday will make it okay for her to fly on Thursday. I could definitely live with that. Best case, the infection is fine and we can go and there's nothing to worry about. Here's hoping!

That's about it for now. As always, I'm going to try to be better about writing. I always think to myself, "oh, that would be good to blog about!" and then get distracted and don't.

(A great example of that is that we sleep trained Michaela. Sort of. So now she's mostly going to bed without a big elaborate ritual that involves us holding her until she's asleep. She went through this period where she didn't want me to put her to bed, only her dad. And it happened at a time when Mike was working in the evenings a lot. So finally I let her cry it out a couple of nights. And then she managed to get herself down, except in certain circumstances, like when she's overtired. Tonight, she started getting fussy and rubbing her eyes, I put her in her crib, she cried a tiny bit and then hummed herself to sleep. Woo hoo!)

I Think I'm Ready

I'd been thinking a lot lately about when it would be time to have a second kid, and have decided-- and told Mike-- that I think we should start trying in September or October. If I got pregnant in October, Michaela would be 10 months old, plus 10 months of pregnancy, so the kids would be 20 months apart. That's a good difference. And if it takes longer than that, then it would be a bigger gap. It's weird to think about "trying" (especially since I still have no sex drive), and it's weird to think that would mean I wouldn't have a break in getting some time to myself, with only me being dependent on my body. (Because I'm still pumping, so I'm still working for Michaela, and if I went right to pregnant, my body would then be working for #2.) But it feels right, so I think that's the plan.