I hate it when I sit down at the computer, latch Julian onto my boob, and then realize that I've just put him on the RIGHT boob, whch means that now I have to cradle him in my right arm, and I will have to do all typing/mousing with my LEFT hand. My left hand is hopelessly slow and stupid and incompetent. It's this useless piece of meat, for the most part. It may take me several hours to finish this paragraph one-handed.

I have noticed though, that I can hold the baby remarkably well with my left arm/hand. With that one arm I can prop him against my shoulder and secure him pretty well while I walk around. I can carry him on my hip easily with my left arm too. When I try to do this with my right arm it feels weird. I think it's because I am always having to do some task while I am carrying him around, and so I do the tasks with my good right arm/hand while using the stupid left arm to carry the baby. It looks like the left arm has finally gotten good at something!

Julian just psyched me out with another series of Phantom Poops. While I was typing and he was nursing, he let out what sounded like Poop Tsunamis inside his diaper. For non-baby-caretakers out there, a pooping baby makes a sound like an incredibly long, loud fart, but with an equally loud squirting liquid sound (because breastfed babies have liquid poop). I don't know, it's incredibly gross if you don't have a baby, but once you have one, the sound is pretty funny. If you have that kind of humor, that is, which I do.

So Julian just did these Poop Tsunamis like ten times in succession within a few minutes, and when I got up to change his diaper I had THREE wipes all wet and ready to clean up the expected torrent of poop from his butt. But then there was just a little *smear* of poop in his diaper! All that was just gas? But I *swear* I heard massive amounts of liquid being expelled. Weird and inexplicable. I can't believe his little belly didn't look like the Goodyear blimp! Can a baby this small possibly HOLD that much gas?

Julian gets cuter and cuter every day. Well, he does have a little bit of baby acne, and the aforementioned Baby Pattern Baldness, but being his mom, I don't focus on those little things. I mean his heart-melting laughs and smiles and coos, and the way he opens up his big blue eyes really wide to look at something that fascinates him and makes an "O" with his little cupid's bow mouth. So so cute. I don't know how we ended up with the World's Cutest Baby, but we did.

We have two new games to invoke the smiles and coos. One is the "Ready...Jump!" game. I hold him under his arms and say "Ready..." then on "Jump!" I stand him up on my lap and he actually stands, I just support him a little bit. He LOVES to work his legs, he is always kicking, kicking, kicking, and so if I give him the opportunity to actually support his weight with his legs, he loves it. He loves to stand! He holds himself up for abut 30 seconds or so and then his legs give way and I make a melting noise while he melts down to a sitting position. We take a little break of a few seconds for him to rest, then I say "Ready...." and he gets all excited. Then I stand him up on the couch and different places all around me, like he's jumping all over with each repetition. He gets so fired up and practically smiles his face off. I jump him on to the dog's back and let him stand there, he "jumps" onto Daddy's shoulder, just everywhere! Good old-fashioned fun.

We sang "Old MacBaby had a Farm" this morning, with all kinds of weird animals and noises, while I made him dance around to the beat, and THAT was a good time too, let me tell you.

Yep, when he's not fussing, he's a whole lot of fun. And when I'm not feeling like I'm going to lose my mind because it's been two days since I peed without holding a baby in my left arm while trying to get my pants off, then I'm having a great time too. In spite of feeling frustrated at times, I'm still having fun for the most part. All I have to do is think about July, when I have to go back to work...it sends cold shivers up and down my spine. ALL DAY without my baby? I might as well just lose my mind right now, because I can't imagine being OK with that in July when he's even cuter and more able to do stuff. Yikes. I can work myself into a hard cry if I think about it for more than a minute or so. Well, maybe we'll win the lottery. Maybe I should actually play the lottery.

There goes the Poop Tsunami again. I SWEAR that was poop and not just gas. But I could be wrong. Hey, that last one was Slo-Mo. Instead of "PFFFFFFFFFTTTTT", it was like "pop..pop..pop..pop..pop". Crazy.

Oh, in other recent baby news...who knew that penises required so much care? We had him circumcised, and it broke my heart at the time to think of him having his little foreskin cut off. I mean, coming at my DAY-OLD baby's GENITALS with a SCALPEL! And cutting part of his penis off! Ugh. I couldn't watch. I made Dan go and watch because he insisted on doing it. My only comfort was that it would make cleaning his penis easier, and also that there might be some girls who would think he was icky if he had his foreskin later on. Those girls are stupid, but I don't know, maybe he'll fall in love with some stupid girl and be heartbroken because she is grossed out by his foreskin, and then he'd curse me for not having him circumcised. Then again, he could be one of those guys who feels like he was violated by being circumcised as a baby and wants his foreskin back. Those guys do exist in fairly large numbers, believe me.

So the cleanliness aspect...I figured that his penis would be low-maintenance, but I stil have to pull back the little rim of foreskin remaining and clean under there all the time. And I didn't know to pull it *way* back to clean underneath at the beginning when I was in the hospital and was letting the nurses handle most of the diaper changes (and just trying not to lose my mind from the C-section post-traumatic stress disorder), so some chunk of smegma got lodged in a little crevice or something, and I guess since he's so new, some skin started to grow over it. Talk about crazy! I mean, I didn't get a Penis Care Handbook with him when he was born, and I certainly don't own a penis, so who knew? I saw these two white litte Funky Chunks when I would give him a bath and pull his little rim of foreskin back to wash under there, but I couldn't dislodge them with a normal washcloth scrubbing, even a fairly hard scrubbing with soap, and I didn't want to like, scrub his little penis to death, so I just left them. Maybe it was just skin?

Finally I decided that it wasn't just skin, I should get rid of those Funky Chunks somehow, so one day during his bath I pulled his foreskin way, way, WAY back and, no joke, had to use *tweezers* to remove those white specks/chunks from a crevice in there. They were embedded! And there was some irritation around them, of course. Not a lot, but some. I was so relieved to get them out, I had nightmares of him having a weird-looking penis and being single and celibate for the rest of his life.

So what's the deal though? I agreed to the circumcision only so that he would have an easy-to-clean penis, but now I have to do all this daily maintenance to prevent a repeat of the Funky Chunk episode. And if he *wasn't* circumcised, supposedly you can't even retract the foreskin for the first year anyways (because it's attached), so does that mean that in fact an uncut penis would be easier to clean on a baby? What's going on here?

There is an acronym commonly used on mothering websites and mailing lists... NAK. Guess what it means? Nursing at Keyboard. That's right, right now there is a small army of women with pillows on their laps (or not), babies latched on, typing one or two-handed while they feed the baby AND get online at the same time. If you get your pillows arranged right so as to nurse hands-free, it works out fine.

Little Man is asleep on my lap as we speak, worn out from several games of "Ready...Jump!" and a hearty lunch NAK. I won't be making any necklaces today, for sure. Propane torch operation and babies on laps do not mix well. Maybe someday I'll have some free time to do something creative.

In the meantime, maybe I'll order one of these t-shirts for Julian...heehee