Big Boobies for Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all the mommies out there, but especially to our moms, Mamaw O'Neal and Meemaw Ross. Dada and I have an insane appreciation for both of you now that Isaac has evolved the 'tude of a 13-year-old. I am sad to say we deserved this, having both tortured our moms with the same act when we were little.

We also want to give a shout-out to little Simon, who made his debut on Friday to fellow Mid-Atlantic seasoned-pro mom Erin. Excellent timing on his part, no?

My Mother's Day was relatively uneventful. I was treated in the morning to an extra hour of sleep as Dada took the babies to fetch me some Starbucks. Then Dada gave me the best present a mommy could ever ask for -- he picked up the house. Not a small feat by any means, especially since we still have our Indy vacation gear spread from here to kingdom come.

The weather was beautiful and we spent most of the day in the backyard playing together and burning sticks in Dada's latest and long-desired acquisition, a chiminea. You can see the stress dissolving away from his face as he sits in his plastic lawnchair, breaking sticks from the gazillion trees around our house and tossing them into his fire. This stress is magically reincarnated in me as I have multiple royal cows about how this new toy surely means that there is some kind of skin graft in our children's future. So far they are both easily redirected from the fire by allowing them to dump water into the sandbox, and at the rate Dada is burning sticks, there won't be much fire in our futures at all unless he starts chopping down trees for fun.

The biggest news to report is that I think we can consider Jacob to be officially weaned. He hasn't had a boobie since 11:00 pm Thursday. He is doing pretty well, considering. He doesn't even notice it during the day, and is stepping up his cow milk intake a bit to keep up with the loss in calories. He is not coping too terribly well at night, which really is to be expected, considering he's nursed himself to sleep probably 80% of the time for his entire life to date. The past two nights when he's awakened at 1-ish, it's taken about an hour of solid screaming to convince him that he should just shut up and go back to sleep already. While that sounds terrible enough, most of that hour is spent wrestling him in the rocking chair, on the couch, in our bed, walking around. Trust me, dude will have NONE of being left awake in his crib -- that is a project for another day entirely. And the entire time he's screaming, he's thrashing about like a rabid alligator. Normally, this would be annoying, but with 72 hours elapsed since his last drink at the momma-trough (and with him previously nursing 3 or 4 times a day. He's a wakeful man.), it is additionally extremely painful in the chest-al area.

My bosoms are just plain scary. I'm almost ready to lop them off, they hurt so bad. They are like aching, alien balls of mutant concrete. It's awful. I never went through this with Isaac because he cut himself off so gradually. How long can I expect my throbbing Hooters boobs to stick around? The only thing that seems to help is ice packs, and because we are spending much time enjoying the outside, it's not like I can walk around with those things on. Not that I have some sort of classy reputation to maintain or anything. Does anybody have any other suggestions? (I've also tried expressing a little milk once a day, but I lent all my pumps out and apparently I have no talent for manual expression)