The Poop Rating Scale

Upon my return home from work one day recently, our nanny casually mentioned that Miri had pooped that day.  Yet it wasn't until after she left for home that I read in her log:

It left me wondering, just how extensive were these poops?  You see, Miri has the unfortunate habit of storing up poop for eight, nine, ten days or more and then detonating, and pity the soul who happens to be there when she blows.  I searched the house for signs of an epic blowout, but there were no dirty diapers in the trash, soiled outfits soaking in the laundry room, or empty cases of wipes.  Nothing but a smug-looking baby and a roll of paper towels that was suspiciously thinner than what I remembered leaving.  But our nanny is notoriously good at cleaning up her (really the kids') tracks and downplaying any trouble they caused her.  If only there were an objective way to record the magnitude of these poops . . .

But wait.

Then I recalled the poop rating scale, born in our early days of this parenting adventure.  What is this rating scale, you ask?  Let me explain.

You've all seen this, the ubiquitous pain scale used in the medical world to rate the severity of pain.  At my job in the hospital, the majority of my day revolves around pain, whether it's evaluating pain, treating pain, or preventing recurrence of pain.  We discuss pain extensively, in terms of its location, its quality, its exacerbating and alleviating factors, and its severity.

In contrast, when I am at home the majority of my day centers not around pain, but around poop.  Yet the parallels are endless.  We discuss poop in terms of its location ("Mom, Tess got poop on the floor!"), its quality ("Mama, why is Miri's poo poo yellow?"), its exacerbating and alleviating factors ("Mama, I need more fruit."), and it's severity ("Mama, I have a code brown!").

Similar to the pain scale, the poop scale ranges from one to ten, with one being barely a hint of a stain on the diaper to ten, a full-scale explosion soiling not only diaper and baby, but all surrounding surfaces including changing mat, caretaker, and any pieces of furniture unlucky enough to be within a 4-foot radius.

The poop scale accomplishes three main goals:

1. Brevity.  In the heat of the moment, with poop cascading down a screaming baby's legs, words can escape you aside from "level nine, need backup!" (see photo above)

2. Forecasting.  In our first couple months as new parents, we maintained a ridiculously detailed and painstaking log of Anna's every feeding, nap, pee and poop.

Cut us some slack; we were rookie parents and had no idea what we were doing.  Anyway, this extensive record keeping brought one benefit: pattern recognition.  Similar to analyzing the Farmer's almanac to predict rain, noting elimination patterns can help predict future events (i.e. "Last poop was 7 days ago and only a level 3.  Time to batten down the hatches, people, a big one is on its way.")

3. Objectivity.  Just as with pain, one's perception of the quantity and destructiveness of a baby poop can be influenced by emotional factors.  The poop scale seeks to reduce the subjectivity of the whole deal, so that a level five is a level five for everyone.  This eliminates the "the fish was THIS big" phenomenon so commonly seen with baby poop explosions.  All this to say, if you're not wiping poop off the TV (true story) or rinsing it out of your hair in the shower, that ain't no level 10, friend.

For more on our family's poop-related adventures, see here and here.

Raising Sports Fanatics: Crocheted Seahawks Beanies

Sports fanaticism runs deep in my family's heritage.  It's right up there with the love of a good bargain, a predilection to eat anything made of shrimp, and a genetic mis-wiring of the brain's signals for feeling hungry and feeling angry (aka "hangry").  Let's just say you don't want to be in the car with my family on the way TO a restaurant, but that's a discussion for another time.

Anyway, back to sport fanaticism.  You might wonder how a family of four girls inherited such a love of sports.  Well, it wasn't from my dad.  My sisters and I were lucky enough to grow up in Chicago in the era of the Bears, and one of my earliest memories is of my petite mother pounding the ground in front of the TV yelling, "Sack him!  Sack him!"  As toddler girls in 1985, we danced the Superbowl Shuffle right alongside Jim McMahon and Refrigerator Perry (on VHS, of course).

Fast forward a few years, and we reveled in the era of Da Bulls and Michael Jordan's dynasty.  Over the years we found other teams to love: our own high school Bears, the Mariners, Huskies, Storm, Seahawks.

As fans, we were no strangers to body paint.

cheering on a high school basketball game

Or electrical tape.

My big sis is the U; I'm the apostrophe

My little sister even once made a sign protesting the sale of the Seattle Storm and Sonics to Oklahoma, landing herself on the front page of the Seattle Times and every other major paper in Western Washington.  She also achieved the highest level of superfan-dom: making it on ESPN.  Now THAT's a fan.

Now I have the high calling of grooming my own three girls into proper sports fans.  Like any other parent, I want to raise them to recognize good and evil, to root for the right team and boo for the Yankees of the world.  Or in this particular case, to cheer for the Seahawks and cry out for the downfall of the 49ers.  For my girls who unfortunately love dress-up and tutus more than TV and sports, the initiation into becoming a fan requires more than a bowl of chips and a TV remote.  For them, the road to fan-dom requires froofy clothes.  So I picked up some yarn and went to town with this earflap hat pattern.  After their initial rejection of the hats, we went into fierce contract negotiation, eventually coming to a deal:  they would wear the hats, give up all photo rights and royalties, not to mention a future first-round draft pick, if, and only if, I added a pom pom.  Done.

Go Seahawks!

A Room of Her Own: Painting

How embarrassing, only one blog post for the entire year so far.  It's true, there hasn't been much in the way of projects this year, aside from one big one (born in October):

Between hyperemesis gravidarum and a couple other pregnancy ailments, growing her pretty much took up all my time and energy this past year, leaving little space for creativity.  Now that she's out, we have some catching up to do!  But first, a few old projects that I never got around to posting.

First, Tess' room.

Why is it that some major life decisions can come so easily while seemingly minor decisions can be agonizing?  For both of the houses we purchased, we literally walked in, looked around, and put an offer within 24 hours of laying eyes on them.  Sometimes you just know.  I also choose my medical school in the span of the five minutes it took to drive through the beautiful forest surrounding campus.  So why oh why did it take three months to settle on the right paint color for Tess' room?  (Not to mention the four years it took for us to select couches for the family room, but that's another story.)

Some of the deliberating stemmed from the fact that my beloved second-born would finally have a room of her own.  She might have her older sister's hand-me-down crib and hand-me-down clothes, but the room decor would be 100% chosen for her.  It was my tangible way of saying to her, "You are important!  You are loved!  We made this room just for you!"

Anyway, after dozens of paint swatches and several trips to various hardware stores, we took the plunge on a light but warm shade of gray.

My super-talented graphic designer and artist sister assisted in painting a flowering branch design using painters' tape to make the freeform branches and a stencil for the flowers.

I added a few splashes of pink and some finishing touches.

And the nursery is complete.  Alas, just in time for her to turn two and a half, graduate to a big-girl bed, and be displaced by her baby sister.

White Noise in a Can

Visiting family for the holidays, with kids out of their normal routine and home comforts. One thing we can still bring with us is the familiar hum of white noise. Our just-about-4-year-old still loves the sound during nap time (yes, we still got it!) and bedtime. We like to think it drowns out surrounding noises too, for a longer nap.

The key ingredient here for making a White Noise in a Can is this small white "turn anything into a speaker" Rock-It 2.0 portable vibration device (yes, despite the description, it's a speaker, people) which I received as a conference promotional item. It uses two AAA batteries and plugs into a music source. (They even have a Rock-It 3.0 with built-in rechargeable battery.) The "rock-it pod" sticks to something and vibrates it to make noise, so the chocolate-covered-cherry can becomes the speaker!

You probably have an old MP3 player lying around. Smartphones seem to have made these little guys obsolete. Upload a white noise MP3 file to the player, and put it on the repeat-one play mode. Our favorite track is a vacuum cleaner sound we found somewhere on the web for free.

Ingredients:

1. Rock-It 2.0
2. MP3 player
3. Chocolate-covered-cherry can (cherries consumed)
4. White noise MP3 track.

Yes, they have smartphone apps for white noise, but during that nap or bed time might be just the time you want to use your phone. And when traveling, you may want to keep your precious smartphone battery life too.

You can also power the Rock-It 2.0 via USB cable. Shown above, an optional USB AC adapter fits nicely in the can too, so you don't need to use as many batteries!

Less Messy Baking With Kids: Peppermint Fudge Cookies

I love to bake, and I love my kids, so logic would suggest that I love to bake with my kids.

And maybe, one day, I will.  But right now, baking with Anna is usually a 10 minute activity until her attention turns to something else, leaving me with a half-finished product and a trashed kitchen.  I admire her enthusiasm and desire to do everything by herself when it comes to getting dressed in the morning or cleaning up her room, but with baking, independence usually leads to mess and more mess. Did I mention she likes to eat flour?

I have come to terms with the fact that, while imprecise and messy, baking with Anna can be fun if I focus on the process rather than the end result (a much needed lesson for me in many arenas).

When she asked me to bake Christmas cookies together last weekend, this recipe immediately came to mind.  I received this years ago from my MOPS group, and wanted to share it with others who love the idea of baking with kids more than the reality.  These cookies are quick, easy, hands-on, and relative mess-free thanks to the minimal amount of measuring.

Ingredients:
1 box of Devil's Food Cake mix
2 eggs
1/2 cup of vegetable oil
1 box of red and white peppermint crunch Andes mints
sprinkles (optional)

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine cake mix, eggs, and oil.

Roll into tablespoon-sized balls with your hands and place on ungreased cookie sheet.

Optional step:  At this point, feel free to reshape your kid's slug-shaped dough wads into round balls when she's not looking.

Bake for 8 minutes or until the tops of cookies start to look crinkled.

While the cookies are baking, unwrap Andes mints and try to keep your kid from eating them all.

Immediately after baking, place on mint on top of each cookie.

 After 5 minutes or so, swirl the melted mints with the back of a spoon.  I was hoping for a more swirly red and white frosting look, but they ended up kind of pinkish.  Oh well.  We threw some red sprinkles on there at the last minute to Christmas-ify them a bit.

That's it!  Thirty minutes max from start to finish and only one bowl, spoon and measuring glass to wash.  Merry Christmas and Happy Baking!

Redemption for the Second Born: A Room of Her Own

In the months leading up our firstborn's arrival, I pored over nursery bedding, studied paint swatches, researched cribs, and literally obsessed over getting her room just perfect.

In contrast, four months AFTER our secondborn arrived, we shoved our clothes into one side of our bedroom closet, crammed a pack 'n play into the other side, and called it good.

(first she slept in the bouncy chair)

(then in the pack n play)

Oh, to be a secondborn.

Then we moved into a new house!  To assuage the guilt of banishing Tess to sleep in a closet for the first year of her life, I wanted to create a really awesome room for her in the new place.  Without spending much money.  And with limited snatches of time.  The previous occupant was a 14-year-old boy, so it is taking some work to transform the room from a teenaged-boy-cave to baby girl sanctuary, a process that very well might take months.  Or years.

But for now, here is project #1, the refinishing of an old dresser.

I picked up this cute little dresser at our neighborhood yard sale, where it was offered for $15.  After some discussion, I ended up paying . . . $20.  Seriously, I might be a cheapskate, but I am the world's worst barterer.

Anyhow, the little dresser was so cute, but someone had decided to paint it eggplant and forest green.  Seriously?  I'm not sure which decade this color combo was hot.  So we read this awesome tutorial on painting old furniture and went crazy.

First came the sanding.  This took forever with our little sander and my hands are vibrating just remembering it.

Then with a half-empty bottle of spray primer, some old ceiling paint from a prior plumbing disaster, and some new drawer pulls from Home Depot, we transformed it into this:

Now it matches her crib, and one day we'll re-do the little dresser that we use as a changing table to match as well.  Every time I walk into her room and see this dresser, my heart does a little happy dance knowing that soon my little girl will have a room as sweet as she is.  Plus it sure beats sneaking into the closet to get clothes without waking her up every morning.

Crocheted Flower Hat 2: the baby sister version

I wrote this post several months ago, but I forgot to post it with all of the craziness of buying and selling a house plus travel and work.  Then all of a sudden it was summer and fuzzy winter hats and mittens were replaced by sunhats and sunscreen!  Alas, it was hard to let go, but we are full-on into cold weather again.  Once I made it through the denial stage, I realized that I truly do love fall, with its autumn leaves, hot drinks, hearty soups, and of course, warm fuzzy clothes:




At 9 months of age, baby Tess (above) almost had as much hair as Anna had at birth (below).  Almost.



But it's not quite enough to keep that little noggin warm in these cold, breezy days.  So with the leftover yarn from Anna's hat, I whipped together a little matching beanie for Tess.  I used a spiral pattern rather than crocheting in rounds and joining with a slip stitch, since I wanted to avoid the subtle "seam" that comes with crocheting in rounds.  I modified this pattern to make a hat that had some room for Tess to grow.  The spiral pattern gets a little funky where I start and end the border, but a well-placed flower motif hides that bit.



I couldn't get a good shot of the hat before Tess would pull it off, so I borrowed Anna's bear for a close-up.  Hold still, Baby Grandma Bear:

The Stool Stool

There was a time when it would've seemed strange to me to see a toddler scoot across the floor, poop underneath the kitchen table, and ask for a cookie.

That time has long passed.

In fact, this scene unfolds pretty much every night around 5:30pm.  Just as we get that first bite of steaming food into our mouths, the resounding cry bursts forth from the littlest member of the clan demanding her potty chair: "Potty!  Poo-poo!  Potty!  Poo-poo!"

From all this dinner-time defecation sprung the idea for our next baby gear invention: the high-chair commode.  Basically an elevated potty chair with straps and a tray.  Or a high chair with a removable trap-door.  You get the idea.  We would call it "The Stool Stool."  Why not take advantage of the gastrocolic reflex to do a little double duty feeding and toileting combo?  Another weapon in the fight against the poop-ocalypse.  We have yet to work out the issue of offensive odors during mealtime (Jeff proposed a fan with charcoal filter), but perhaps in The Stool Stool version 2.0.

I'm Still Here, El Guapo

We're back after a four month blogging hiatus, and what a whirlwind these past four months have been.  We started casually talking about moving, with hopes of finding a new house in the next couple years before Anna starts school.  We thought, why not have a look at a few houses?  Who knew that in our first DAY of visiting houses that we would find the one?.  Apparently, we're the kind of people who take three years to buy a couch, but one day to buy a house.

our awesome realtor, wheeling and dealing to make this house ours

The harder part was/is selling our old house.   First we had to prepare it for staging.  This meant removing 75% of the furniture from the house, though really that meant removing 100% of useful furniture and leaving only decorative display tables and wicker baskets.  Then our realtor hired a professional stager.  The stager continued on the theme of rendering the house unlivable by replacing kitchen appliances with fake orchids and placing breakable knicknacks in low places.  For an entire month, we had to pull the coffeemaker out of the oven in the morning and go to the garage to toast bread.

this is how it looks all the time, really

This was all while going about daily life with a toddler, who has an affinity for scattering toys to the farthest corners of the house, and a baby, who insists on feeding herself and does so with exuberance.  Every morning, the beautifully staged house would last about 10 minutes before being returned to its natural state.  Whenever a realtor would call wanting to show the house, I would fly into a cleaning frenzy while the kids attempted to undo my efforts.  Did I mention that they were also on totally opposite napping schedules, meaning that any time of day that someone wanted to see the house, one of the kids would have to be rudely awoken from a nap?  If I had known how difficult this whole process would be, I would've said, "Forget it, dream house.  You're pretty great, but this might be the death of me."

In the end, we survived the house showings (though it's still on the market), survived a nail-biting multiple offer scenario on the new house (thank you, Jesus!), survived a move (just barely),  and here we are.  After the move, Anna told us, "I want to stay here in the new house forever."  We couldn't agree more.

the new house's treehouse

The new house is rife with possibilities and just crying out for projects, so we hope to get some of them up on the blog soon.  First up is putting Tess' room together.  After living in our closet for the first year of her life, she deserves some guilt-ridden overcompensation in the form of a really cute room.

Cloth Diapers and the Poop-ocalypse

Like many Seattle-ites and other parents out there, we jumped on the cloth diaper bandwagon when our firstborn made her entrance into the world.  For all the benefits (saving money, sending less junk to landfills, getting to outfit your baby in cute diaper covers, blah blah blah), there’s no getting around one glaring downside.   You will be washing out a lot of poop.  A few years back, our then-single and childless friend Jeremy expressed shock and disgust that we washed cloth diapers in the same laundry machine that we use on our regular clothes.  Is that disgusting?  Maybe to non-parents.  But Jeremy's day is coming soon, for he and his wife Chrissie are expecting a little bundle of joy, AND they're planning on using cloth.  Yippee!  So this post is dedicated to Jeremy and all parents who are considering cloth but aren't so excited about the prospect of handling poop.

In the pre-kid era, Jeff and I considered ourselves somewhat immune to the yuckiness of poop.  After all, Jeff grew up on a mini-farm and once almost drowned in a lagoon of cow manure.  And while I wasn’t literally up to my neck in poop, I have done my fair share of gastroenterology rotations in med school and residency.  Not to mention working as a nanny before that.  But nothing could prepare us for the sheer magnitude and variance of the poop that parenthood would bring.

I remember the early days of Anna’s life, when she would leave tiny streaks of sticky newborn poo on her diapers, and we would naively congratulate ourselves on our fortitude for not being grossed out by diapers like so many parents we knew.  Then in the coming weeks, she impressed us with her, well, productivity.  And explosivity.  Jeff developed a rating scale to quickly communicate the magnitude of her output, ranging from a 1 (barely necessitating a diaper change) to a 10 (full soilage of diaper, outfit, surrounding environment, and caretaker, thus necessitating a load of laundry, a shower, and a glass of wine).  This is also known as the poop-ocalypse.  Yet we still patted ourselves on the back for handling her mustardy breastmilk poo-poo with hardly a second thought.  But, oh, did we have another thing coming.  Enter solid foods and a new realm of utterly foul diapers.  Suddenly our pro-cloth diaper stance began to waver. If we were going to make it to the potty training stage with cloth diapers, we were going to have to add some anti-poop weapons to our arsenal.  Here were our weapons of choice:

Weapon #1: The disposable diaper liner.  These little papers resemble a dryer sheet that goes inside the cloth diaper.  If the baby leaves a little present, the liner can easily be dumped into the toilet and flushed down.  While great in theory, these failed the practicality test, since they cost up to 5-10 cents a piece (seriously? for a sheet of beefed up toilet paper?).  We didn't use these for long.



Weapon #2: The diaper sprayer.  We hit a freecycle jackpot on this one!  This hooks up to the toilet and sprays poop off the diaper into the toilet bowl so you don’t have to do the whole “dunk and swirl” business.  Caution advised, my friend, spray downward.  Downward!

Weapon #3: The potty chair.  At 8 months of age, Anna decided to go poop every time she sat in her high chair for dinner (oh she’s going to love this story when she’s a teenager).  Seriously, every single day.   Invariably, our hot dinner would grow tepid as one of us left to deal with a poopy diaper.  After a few weeks of this, we decided that enough was enough and in frustration, plunked her on the potty chair to let her do her business.  Who knew she would love it so much that she would then refuse to poop in diapers from then on?  We started the same thing with Tess around 7 months, when she could sit on the potty without falling off.  Boy does she love using that potty chair!  Unfortunately, it hasn't solved the problem of cold dinners (tonight BOTH of the girls interrupted dinner to use the toilet), but it sure has cut down on dirty diapers.

Parents: how do YOU handle cloth diapers and the poop-ocalypse?