The Cupcake's Room

R would like to take you on a tour of the room that Daddy and Grandpa built especially for her.



Come on in!


Here's my dresser that Daddy bought from a resale shop. It's where we keep the bedtime books.


This is what my bed USED to look like. That's an old picture, let's show you the new one...


Look! I have a toddler bed! Daddy removed the front part of my crib so I can get in and out of bed all by myself! The steps help. Daddy says he found them in the garage, and that they had been there since before Mommy and Daddy bought our house. The picture above the bed was cross-stitched by my great grandmother, Bubba, for my Mommy years ago. The owl mobile used to be above the changing table in my old bedroom, but now Daddy hung it over my bed. Mommy says that friends made it for me at my Baby Shower. I love it!


Reading my books... Oh yeah, the tour.


Here's the glider chair where Mommy spent much time rocking me when I was a baby. The wall decorations used to be in Mommy's room when she was a little girl. Her mommy-- my Oma-- gave them to her. The Hello Kitty pillow was a gift from friends; it came from Japan!


Well, that's it! I hope you like my room as much as I do! Taa!

Fruit Leather

I'm making a batch of spiced peach leather right now, so I figured I'd better upload the pics I took of my last batch of strawberry leather.


I had never made fruit leather before this summer. Prepackaged fruit leather from the store was such a rare luxury that I didn't indulge much because of the price. Now, while my fifth batch is dehydrating, I can say making it yourself is fun, easy, cheap, and delicious! And you can take pride in your homemade, good-for-you treats.

It's the perfect healthy snack for little ones!


I first got the idea to try making fruit leather from Barefoot Childhood. Though that post got me on the path to making homemade fruit leather, in the end I didn't follow those directions. I chose to boil my fruit before blending it to get the natural sweetness from the fruit, thus eliminating any added sugar. Trust me, they taste plenty sweet without the extra sugar (this coming from the lady who threw away her own birthday cake because it was too sweet!). I also chose to run a dehydrator to dry the fruit out as opposed to baking on low heat in the oven. If you want to add sugar and cook/dry out in the oven, then go ahead and click the link above!


INGREDIENTS

Four apples, two pears, one lemon, and a good dose of flavoring fruit (I've used boxes of strawberries, a bag of cherries, a couple peaches, and half a bag of seedless grapes. All turned out yummy).

Rinse well.


DIRECTIONS

Prepare fruit to be cooked. Peel, core, and chunk apples and pears into small pieces.

Toss apple and pear chunks into a large pot with 1/2 a cup of water (to help get things started) and the juice of half of the lemon. Boil uncovered on medium heat.

Prepare flavoring fruit to be cooked. (Strawberries get sliced, cherries I just ripped in half to get the stones out, peaches get peeled and broken into pieces, and grapes get plucked from the vine and popped between your fingers.)

Toss flavoring fruit into the pot and boil down (still uncovered) about 20 minutes.

When it looks something like this, it's done.

BONUS STEP: While you wait, you can squeeze the other lemon half into a cup, add a couple of spoonfuls of that delicious juice from the pot, and have some rockin' flavored lemonade!

Blend.

BONUS STEP: Feed the baby fresh applesauce.

Pour sauce onto parchment paper cut to fit dehydrator trays, and spread in a thick layer with a spoon. (When I say "cut to fit" I mean Senpai traced the tray with a razor blade.)




Dehydrate overnight.

Check in the morning and then every couple of hours after that. Each tray will be done on its own time, usually the bottom layers dry completely before the top. I remove the empty trays to get the top trays closer to the heating element.


Peel leather away from the parchment paper, tear into strips, and store in a glass container on the counter. No need to refrigerate. I've heard that mold will eventually grow on fruit leather, but I haven't had that problem, I think because the dehydrator does such a good job of removing all liquid. I'd say your batch will last about two weeks, that is, if you don't eat them all first! ;-) We haven't made it past one week. :-P

One last thing: if you haven't guessed by now, this is a very flexible recipe. I've made it without the pears, and I've made it using the juice from the whole lemon. If you're really wondering how much flavoring fruit to add, the answer is, "How much have you got?" It's very hard to go wrong with fruit leather, so play around with the ingredients you have on hand.


Enjoy!

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A couple of post ideas have been swirling around my head, but I haven't made time for them in between marathons of anime and Facebook games. Sigh. Such important time wasters, right?

So tonight I wanted to just put the ideas out there; short, quick, and to the point.

1. Sibling. We're working on it, but no bones yet. We conceived R the first month we tried, which makes me wonder after a couple months already if the HELLP Syndrome messed me more than I had previously thought. Am I... infertile? I don't know, but if nothing happens again next month, I'll put the idea of becoming pregnant again to rest. The harder it is to make a sibling, the less of a good idea it seems to be.

2. Yo Gabba Gabba! We saw the live show tonight. R was too stunned in the first half to make any sort of reaction, but after intermission she started to clap during the songs. She didn't fuss at any point, so it's safe to say she enjoyed the experience, loud and crazy as it was. (Update: Hey, look! I wrote this post!)

3. Song. Senpai has been mentioning lately how hard it is to talk to me because I never seem to have an answer. He retracted that pessimism tonight after overhearing other women talk on and on about nothing. "Your words [though few] mean so much more," he had said. But it got me thinking: I express myself less and less these days. I used to sing, write, paint, whatever. But my voice has quieted and my creative fire has burned out. The thought had struck me awhile ago of enrolling in singing lessons to try to return some range and depth to my singing voice. I think I need to actually do it now. Try to ignite some sort of flame in my soul again, before I go mute.


That's it for now. I hope to elaborate more on these topics later, if I can peel myself away from The Sims Social, that is.

Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

I tried my hand at canning this year. I had never done it myself, though I had watched my Mom make strawberry jam, spiced peach jam (my favorite!), and canned peach slices in the past. Our tomato plants had exploded this year (as they usually do, actually) with more tomatoes than we could use up at once, so I decided to try making homemade spaghetti sauce. I followed the instructions, including the seasoning recipe, found here, omitting the celery and salt.

The first time I tried making tomato sauce earlier in the season, we picked every tomato we could find, including the yellow variety, to try to get the 20 lbs required. I started right when R went to bed at 8 pm, and did not finish until 2 in the morning. I am not impressed with that batch. The texture was watery and stringy because the tomatoes would not boil down, and the 1/4 cup of lemon juice in addition to all of those yellow tomatoes made it taste incredibly tart. I canned it anyway and called it "Zesty Marinara."

I decided to try again. This time, I collected and froze the tomatoes as they ripened in batches. I had heard that freezing and thawing tomatoes was an easy way to remove the skin, and I thought it might cut down on the preparation time. Not at all. I started the process this morning at 9 am, and I'm writing this post as the jars are in the canning bath now at 2 pm. My back hurts from leaning over the sink trying to remove seeds for three hours, and my feet hurt from standing in front of the stove seasoning the sauce for the rest of the time. When I looked at the large pile of unusable skin, seeds, liquid, and other tomato parts, and compared it to the pile of usable tomato flesh that was HALF its size, I told myself, "Never again." This is far too much work. I would rather let tomatoes rot on the vine than try to do this again.

The plus side to today's aches and pains is that this batch can be properly labeled "Spaghetti Sauce." I didn't use a single yellow tomato, I only added two splashes of lemon juice instead of the 1/4 cup the recipe called for, and I blended the sauce to make it a better texture. Freezing and thawing the tomatoes removed far too much liquid, though, and I had to add 3 cups of water back into the sauce. I'm only getting 5 pint jars out of this batch, which is incredibly frustrating since only 4 jars fit in the canning bath at a time. I'll be waiting an extra 35 minutes just for one jar to process, grrr. But at least it tastes good.



My kitchen is a disaster, sigh. Next time I try canning, I think I'll stick with jams.

the NICU post

(Are you a new NICU parent? Read here for tips about what to do during your baby's NICU stay.)


I go more in detail into the birth in a previous post, but I'll start here with a quick recap: Rosemary was born at 33 weeks gestation. With the full moon, my body tried to push her out. The doctors were able to stop the contractions, but my liver fought back in the form of HELLP Syndrome, demanding that the baby get OUT. Start up the pitocin; my body couldn't handle being pregnant anymore. That's how my baby was born.

She had received the steroids for her lungs while she was still in utero, so she came out with a healthy cry. At least three of the many people in the operating room focused on her as soon as she came out. Is she breathing? How's her heartbeat? Any liquid in the lungs? Very fast-- within a couple of minutes-- she was cleaned up, wrapped up, and brought over to me (though still out of reach) to see that sweet, tiny face for all of one second. Just as fast as they brought her over they took her away, out of the room, down the hall, to NICU. Senpai asked if he could follow, and then my family was gone. Being left behind, without either my husband or newborn baby in the delivery room was an intensely lonely feeling that tasted bittersweet. My thoughts were along the lines of, "I carried this baby for seven months, I've been in pain for her, I just delivered her, and now... I can't see her." I clung to the image of her little red face, already fading in my memory, as I was taken back to my room and monitored by the nurses. She had been born at 9:29 pm. When I still hadn't seen her two hours later, I demanded to be taken to her. I touched my baby for the first time at 12:20 am.

First trip to the NICU.

Entering the NICU, it was so uniquely different from the rest of the hospital. People had to be buzzed in, signed in, watches and jewelry removed, and hands and arms scrubbed with disinfecting soap up to the elbow (I just remembered the smell of the soap). Children, the little germ harvesters that they are, were not allowed in. Parents and two family members (that you choose, but must specify on a form) were the only people allowed to see the baby, but only two at a time.

The NICU was divided into different sections with varying levels of care, labeled from A to G. Rosemary started out in an open bed in the last room, G. After the first night they then moved her to an incubator (they call them "isolettes" these days) against the wall to the right when you walked in the door. The first time I saw her in the NICU, she was on her stomach in her open bed, breathing with the help of a respirator tube. I wasn't worried. I knew she had received the steroids for her lungs, and I had heard her healthy cry after she had been delivered. I think I was also too tired to be worried. I was just so elated to finally see and touch the tiny 4 lb 13 oz little girl that had made my uterus her home for so long. I was taken back to my room after only about 20 minutes because I was starting to fall asleep in the wheelchair.



I was not one of those Moms who spends every minute in the NICU. I was still healing for one, very exhausted, trying to get my body's systems back to normal, and two, I believed that the doctors and nurses in the NICU were taking good care of my baby. She wasn't sick, she just wasn't meant to be out in the world yet. All she needed was to grow and learn how to eat, otherwise she was a healthy little camper. She would forget to breath sometimes, and for that she was put on a daily caffeine injection. I never saw her get stuck with anything. I would see the aftermath-- a new IV line in her head, little red spots on her hands-- but the nurses did the dirty work when the family wasn't around. I'm sure seeing her in pain would have broken my heart in two.



Senpai got to hold her first. I wasn't there to see it, but he came back to my room looking so excited. The first time I held her, maybe two days after she had been born, was so magical. She was itty bitty and warm, and red like a little lobster from the jaundice.



Under the bilirubin lights.

I think it was the fourth day when Senpai came back into my hospital room after visiting Rosemary in the NICU and said, "They want to start putting clothes on her." I looked over at the duffel bag we had packed with things from home, inside of which I knew was a teeny-tiny sweater I had crocheted while I was still pregnant. I had followed a pattern, but even with using a larger hook size the gauge came out incredibly small and the sweater looked like it could fit a doll. I had shaken my head at the microscopic sweater when it was completed, wondering how it would ever fit a full-term baby. There in my hospital room, I felt foolish all of a sudden for wanting to put it on her. Senpai had asked me before if he should bring it over to the NICU, but I hadn't wanted him to, I don't know why. It wasn't until the "order" as it were came down from the nurses that I knew she needed that sweater. We went right over, me clutching the smallest little sweater in the world, and miraculously, it fit her. That sweater I made was the first piece of clothing my baby ever wore. There was a matching hat, too, but it wouldn't fit over the IV line they had just put in her head.



The first way her Daddy and I got to care for her was to change her diaper. I don't know about Senpai, but I felt odd doing it at first, like it wasn't my place. I thought, "The nurses handle everything, feeding, diapering, changing bed linens, etc... Who am I to care for my baby? Wait, I'm her mother. I'm supposed to be doing this anyway. But she's in their charge; they make the important decisions, not I. Oh well, just change your baby's diaper, already!" That's how my head struggled with the facts. But the more we did it, of course, the more comfortable we became being Rosemary's parents.



My Mom and Dad drove up from Florida after Rosemary was unexpectedly born. Mom was able to stay Easter weekend, but she had to return back to work after that. Dad is retired, so he stayed with us the entire time I was in the hospital and even later. I was discharged after a week, but Rosemary was still in the NICU. It was strange.. I was discharged home without my baby. I am so grateful to both of my parents for being there for me when I was weak. Senpai, too, of course. But it would have been really hard if Dad hadn't stayed longer. He helped around the house, drove the 26 miles when I was too tired to do it myself, and kept me company while Senpai was at work. He was glad to help, but he was also happy when Rosemary finally came safely home, so he could return home, too. Thanks, Dad.

I pumped breastmilk to go into her tube, but her little body needed more nutrition than I could provide at first, and she was given formula as well. It was actually more like she was given formula plus the little bits of colostrum that I produced. I put my heart and soul into pumping, waking up every three hours even into the night, trying to rev up production. It wasn't until after I had been discharged home that my breasts finally produced enough milk so the NICU staff could feed her breast milk alone without formula. I was so thrilled to get to that point. I worked with a lactation consultant to try to breastfeed, too. One day I was trying to breastfeed Rosemary behind a screen when I could hear the doctor going over Rosemary's chart with the nurses. A male nurse relayed that Rosemary didn't tolerate formula well, and the doctor got the wrong idea, thinking that I was stopping giving her breast milk. The female doctor became all bullish all of a sudden, "Where's the mom? She's here?" and she poked her head over the screen, while I had my baby to my breast, and demanded to know why I wasn't breastfeeding. I just looked at her incredulously. It's humorous now. I'm glad they had Rosemary's best interests at heart.



Even though the breastmilk was there, getting her to ingest it for herself was a tall mountain to climb. She was born before her sucking reflex had developed. Every day the nurses, Senpai, and I would try to put a bottle in her mouth, just to have her mouth form an "o" from which she would poke her tiny little tongue out. It was the cutest thing in the world. I said, "That's adorable, Sweetie, but it's not going to help you eat." When she finally did learn to suck, it started as only one or two little sucks and then she would stop, mostly from exhaustion. The rest of the bottle had to go down her feeding tube. Gradually she started to drink more and more, still never finishing her bottle. She was just too short on strength and energy. When she had been there for 18 days, I finally broke down. When I got there I learned that the nurse that day had put an entire bottle down her tube, without even trying to get her to drink it. That was the standard procedure-- If a baby doesn't do well for one feeding, just tube feed the next-- but I was ready to punch her. They wouldn't send Rosemary home on a feeding tube, and she wouldn't be rid of the damn thing if they kept using it without even trying to get her to drink the milk for herself. I expressed my concerns to the nurse in the nicest way possible without actually punching her. She went and found the doctor-- a nice Asian fellow, not the bull woman from before-- and after hearing what happened he changed Rosemary's feeding schedule from every 3 hours to... whenever she was hungry.



This simple directive made an unbelievably profound difference. What a brilliant idea! Feed the baby when she's hungry! And, oh man, she ate SO WELL after that. It turned out that every 5 hours was her personal schedule. The NICU staff squirmed at that timeline, not really liking the idea of pushing feedings beyond 4 hours, but it was so good for her. She wasn't eating at 3 hours because she was still tired! She was supposed to be sleeping then according to her own schedule, but here were these nurses prodding her awake and forcing a bottle in her mouth, expecting her to chug it down. But when she was hungry, 5 hours later, she finished the whole bottle, every single one of them. She was discharged a day and a half later.