I love babies. Babies rule. Pudgy arms and stuff. But, uh, they make you old.

Ever have one of those mornings...

When you do everything in your ability to look fashionable and not be fashionably late to fancy playdate at the McDonald's Playland, but 5 minutes into it you have baby poop smeared all over your skinny jeans and you're begging friends for cash for a Happy Meal?  I do.  All the time.

Nothing happens the way I assume it will, so I've just started assuming everything will go to hell and I'm no longer surprised.  It's only 10 til 2 and I'm already back in my jammies as I compose this half-conscious and still coasting on my dark roast, caffeine high.  I do at least 3 loads of laundry a day in order to not have clothes saturated with breast milk, regurgitated breast milk, and toddler boogers.  Just today I've managed to ruin 2 robes, the sheets I just washed yesterday, and the jeans I had planned to wear on our pseudo date tonight because they hold up my ever-sagging ass to acceptable social standards. 

Take Ivy's whole birth experience for example.  It was a scheduled, repeat c-section that should have taken all of 30 minutes in surgery, a few hours recovery time, and they'd hand me a screaming bundle of joy.  Instead, my OB was late because she was on the phone with Fisher-Price tech support and then my baby had to be in intensive care for 10 days because she forgot how to breathe.  It took over a week before I was able to hold her, and I got to be a visitor instead of her mother. 

The genetics were there; she has my nose and stubby legs.  But as a caregiver, I was useless for a week and a half.  So I got up every 2 hours to pump and deliver a few ounces of breast milk to the NICU freezer.  It was all I could do as a parent.  And it may be selfish, but even though my baby was the one hooked up to IVs and tubes out the wazoo,  I wanted to feel needed.  I needed to feel needed.  I had just spent the last 9 months incubating and growing my daughter, and suddenly my services were obsolete?

Now she's a perfectly healthy baby, with colic and all.  It's still hard to process.  At one point after her lung collapsed, we asked the neonatalogist if we had to worry about Ivy being in stable condition.  She answered, "If you're asking me if the baby will die?  I don't know." 

How do you go from that to complaining about leaky diapers and extended bedtimes?  Aren't I supposed to be grateful for every frustrating minute I have with my kids?  I suppose I just have to do what I can , when I can--whether sucking the juice out of my boobs at 3 a.m. or a load of onesies and pants covered in poo.

Todays' subject line quote is from How I Met Your Mother (2005).