The baking of Pollywog #5

14 weeks, 20 weeks, 26 weeks, 30 weeks

I feel like I announced Baby #5 and then just sort of left you all hanging. I mean, I'm in the final stretch of this pregnancy and this is only the second mention of it on the blog. And to think, I was actually worried when I announced the pregnancy on the blog that all of my posts would turn into pregnancy posts.

So, here is what you have missed in the baking of Pollywog #5:

Zach's Monster

I won’t lie, Zach’s monster felt like a never-ending project. You would think the time consuming parts would have been the body or arms, because really, a 2 round stripe gets tedious. But no, I zoomed through those. The longest most time consuming parts were the legs. I got one done, but it was in his original orange that he picked, and it looked BAD. Like eww. I told him no way, he needed to pick a new color. He stuck with orange, but instead of a neon orange he went with a pumpkiny color that looks surprisingly great with the teal and neon green.

That monster sat around unstuffed and legless for a month while I did nothing to it. Just the thought of starting the legs again (after the original orange) made me think of like 20 other things that I should have been doing instead. I just could not make myself knit those legs.

You can do a lot of changing in 10 years.

Ten years ago I had just had Zach. I didn’t put much thought at all into parenting stuff, and I didn’t put any thought at all into labor. I didn’t put thought into breastfeeding or circumcision or vaccinations or co-sleeping or, well, anything. I had just been trying to get through my junior year of high school and praying that he stayed in until I was done with the school year and that, please Lord, my water wouldn’t break while I was at school.

After he was born we did breastfeeding and bed sharing. Zach was such a sweet and easy baby and he made my first year as a mom such a breeze. I never put thought into if were going to be breastfeeding or not. I was raised seeing my mom breastfeed my younger siblings and my aunt breastfeed my cousins; it’s what moms did, so, I did. He was exclusively breastfed until I returned to school in the fall, and continued breastfeeding until he was about one. My favorite time of the day was coming home from school and nursing him. It wasn’t until years and years later that someone pointed out how odd it was for a 17 year old high school student to go into breastfeeding so unquestionably and continue doing it for a year. He also continued to sleep in my bed until right before Ryan was born.

Four months away.

I've had breaks from the blog before - generally brought on by not having internet for a weeks or a month. However, I do believe, actually I know, that this is honestly the first time that I have ever been away from the blog for roughly four months.

It isn't like I woke up one morning and decided, "Hey, I don't want to blog. I have nothing to write about." No, it's more like I woke up one morning, days before the boys got out of school, and I no longer had internet (or cable, but I can honestly make due without that most of the time). It was supposed to be a short break, I was promised a week, maybe two. Somehow that week or two has turned into four months. FOUR MONTHS. I die a little each time I think about that. The problem is, for some reason, the company that we go through is expecting us to pay a bit over $500 to get it back on and even paying a little on it at a time (and a few big amounts) we still haven't been able to pay it all down to get it back on. And of course that isn't even the only big huge bulk thing we're paying on. We're also working on paying down the labor/delivery cost for our doctor, paying him for the regular visits, and all of the testing that for some reason our insurance is paying zero to zilch on. Lets just say that right now internet is not the priority.

(No matter how much I wish it was.)