feeling glum

It's Friday afternoon. I'm home alone*. It's a beautiful day. Next week is the week before spring break. All should be well, and yet I'm feeling rather down.

Part of it is that my left breast still hurts, and I'm reaching the end of the sympathy from friends and most of my family on infections. I know formula would be fine, but breastfeeding is going just fine except for the infections. TS has now doubled her birth weight, and she looks really healthy (unlike her first few weeks). And really, I can't imagine the hassle of preparing and heating formula while we're out and about (which we are a lot of the time). I am impressed by women who remember to always have a bottle packed and can find a place to heat it. Me, I'll take the easier route for us, even if it's definitely painful.

Or maybe it's the daycare I visited this morning. Cute kids, great activities, wonderful staff ... all squeezed into the tiniest 6th floor apartment next to the projects. It's very cheap by our neighborhood's standards (about $1000 per month, although it follows the school calendar schedule and that has a lot of vacation days). It's just that it must be so overwhelming for the little kids to be in such a small space packed with running, crying, laughing, shouting kids all day. And we could afford a part-time nanny if we had to next spring instead (with the perk of finding a Chin.ese-speaking nanny for the fusspot). But then I worry about the pressure to get my work done in less hours, or how hard it is for JD when I have to work every evening to stay afloat. So maybe TS would rather have a less stressed mother and deal with a crowded daycare? Or maybe she will be a champion napper/early to bed and I can deal with just 20-30 hours of daycare a week (to give you a sense of my schedule I clocked at least 50 hours in the library the week before I gave birth, and that was with 6 doctors appointments).

Oh, and daycare for next spring? We need to send in a deposit by Wednesday. Right - one more thing to deal with.

I really hope my energy returns by next week. This Saturday evening is the fusspot's '100 Day' party (a Ch.inese tradition) and I am very much looking forward to it, although I hope that I can somehow keep all 5o guests from handling the baby (my current strategy is to put her in the sling for the party. In a worst case scenario I can always whip out a breast and scare away a decent proportion of the guests :-) But I'd really rather not resort to that if avoidable).

Note: I just wanted to let you know that I deleted my very first comment today from my blog. I love getting comments (it's so nice to know that at least the nice people in the computer can put up with me. hi Io!) and I would not delete something because I disagreed with it. However, today I found a link to a political-group blog anti-IVF (or really anti-gay parenting as far as I could tell) and it was not only dumb but very poorly written and I didn't want any of you to accidentally waste your time there.

* The nanny took TS out.