Today was a resting and nesting day, as G and I were both tired from his nighttime feeding schedule and our full day yesterday: grocery store and dinner for company. In my past life, that would have been a normal day...but with a little one, it was an adventure! I wanted to see if it was possible to do actual grocery shopping with my stroller; not having a car, I've had to choose between either a) carrying G and getting a limited amount of groceries that could be hand-carried or b) using the stroller but being limited by the under-stroller space. The car services offered at the big supermarket are nice, but those tiny, run-down cars would never fit my child, carseat, stroller AND groceries, so that option is out. What we ended up doing was purchasing the bigger items at the cheap superstore. To my dismay, they didn't have shopping baskets, only carts. So I pulled out my shopping bags and proceeded to garner plenty of stares from people who thought I was shoplifting. But it was much easier than trying to break down the stroller and put it in a cart! Once we dutifully purchased our items, we headed over to the more expensive supermarket that offered delivery service. I then transferred G to my wrap carrier and used the stroller as a cart, filling up with spinach and wine and beer (hey, it's for company!) and generally looking like a terrible mother! G slept calm and content on my chest, though, only stirring when I reached into the freezers for some frozen fruit...
After all that fun, we still had to make dinner. My first time from scratch since coming home from the hospital. Knowing that my kitchen time from now on will be shorter, I opted for a meal that would provide useful leftovers for one of our favorite dishes: chicken pot pie. I roasted two chickens, along with potatoes, carrots and green beans. After dinner, I peeled as much of the meat off as I could realistically salvage and saved some of the broth that collected in the slow cooker. In a past life, I would have boiled the bones and made oodles of chicken stock, but I don't have anywhere to put it at the moment, so I regretfully dumped the whole mess into the trash. Next time...
In honor of our resting and nesting day, I organized my closet (out with the huge maternity clothes, out with the non-nursing friendly) and read the magazines we received at the hospital that had been hiding in the guest bathroom. One was an advertising publication for private schools in Rio de Janeiro. I'm so very, very glad that schooling is years away yet. Brazilians seem to send their kids to school frighteningly early for my preference, and there wasn't a school in the list that I would have been thrilled to enroll a child in. And the costs! Astounding.
The second magazine was the Brazilian version of "Parents," called "Pais and Filhos." While there was one nice article about reading and some cute anecdotes (my favorite being the ear-nose-throat doctor's toddler who announced that her daddy "cut people's throats" for a living!), most of it was drivel. And disingenuous, selfish drivel, at that. Here are two egregious samples:
"Meet the children who make our magazine beautiful. They're here purely for fun. We don't support any kind of child labor, including modeling." This from a 98 page magazine in which some 47 different children appear in advertisements. Why do I suspect that a great majority of them weren't working "purely for fun" when modeling luxury clothes or posing for the latest, greatest water park?
But my favorite bit was the article on earrings. Because everyone knows if you have a baby girl, her ears must be pierced, preferably in the hospital, perhaps even before they cut the cord. Just so everyone knows...it's a girl. So I kid you not, one of the features shows the cutest little Tiffany blue felted car display box, with gold-tone wheels, in which rest a R$630 pair of gold and diamond baby studs. The text reads..."The first earrings have to be jewels, there's just no other way. The chance of your baby getting an allergy or inflammation using other materials is huge! If you don't want to or can't buy them, drop hints for the godmother, grandmother or even for daddy...mas do whatever you have to to use soft gold when you pierce her ears, especially if she's a newborn!...This one in the photo, besides being gold with diamonds, come in the cutest little box! It can dress up the bedroom or even, who knows, be a toy-but not too much, so it won't get destroyed!"
Because it won't do to just, you know, wait until you can afford proper earrings...begging is a much more parental task. But maybe that's just me, being a grouch. You never know, with all these pregnancy hormones still floating around...
1 comment:
piercings at birth are so....well, I personally don't see the need, but each to their own I suppose. Haley had terrible infections I hear, as an infant w/pierced ears, then as a 5 yr old w/pierced ears, (having let them grow closed when small), and then again, as a "big" kid getting them done the 3rd time. Perhaps it was the lack of gold and jewels causing the problem. (I am sure that it was more that she "screamed" when they used the cleaner, so no one cleaned them.....)
makes having a son all that much more better, huh? X_X
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