cookies.

I am listening to my husband and Ethan bake cookies in the kitchen. After an entire day of boycotting naps, Carmen fell asleep at 7:30 and I'm trying (but not too hard) to not be lulled to sleep myself listening to her white noise machine over the video monitor. It's been a long day. We are in the throws of a new and exciting (I'll keep telling myself that) season of life and I am handling the change poorly (that's code for eating lots of chocolate) and it's all just very overwhelming. Four out of five days of summer camp as a prequel to school down and it's apparent I'm really bad at getting my kid dropped off someplace on time. I guess this is the thing that Experienced Moms joke about, car lines and drop offs and school events that I've never been able to join in any conversations about because my kids were little and school was so far in the future. Well, here I am. This is my stop. (Please pass the chocolate.)

Tonight the cloth diaper laundry will wait and I'll leave the LaCroix cans littered all over the tables because it must be at least midnight, only it's not even nine. I'm listening to my husband and Ethan bake cookies in the kitchen and Ethan is so hopped up on sugar and adrenaline and whatever-it-is that makes five year olds run at the speed of light constantly, and my husband is so obviously exhausted but acting so engaged in measuring organic cane sugar. It's hard not to smile through the exhaustion as Ethan is chattering about wanting a spot of tea and my husband has no idea what he's talking about and in nine minutes the cookies will be done and everyone is just so overdue for bedtime. I'm equal parts exhausted and also pumped and ready to take on the future that is staring me in the face. It's where exhaustion meets happiness and even though your eyes are burning, with the last bits of energy you're able to muster, your mouth forms a smile.

finn + emma wooden rattle teethers

Ethan was an easy teether. We didn't even know he was getting teeth until they simply popped up one day. He never had an ounce of discomfort or desire to gnaw -- which is a good thing, I suppose, despite the fact I was prepared with an entire drawer full of wooden teethers and "chew toys" (we can call baby toys that, right?). Carmen, on the flip side, is a miserable teether. The buckets of drool and snot and swollen gums -- she's got it all. We were absolutely delighted to find these wood teething rattles by Finn + Emma just in the knick of time. I say "we" because I'm totally captivated by how adorable they are but then there is Carmen who is grateful for the ability to gnaw on something to help her sore, tired gums.

Not only are the teethers a safe wooden alternative to harmful plastics (they're made from untreated Indian hardwood), but they're also rattles. This means they're still fun for Carmen to play with even when her desire to gnaw has briefly subsided.

At age 5, Ethan also likes to use them as maracas to sing his sister lullabies (can we talk about how he pronounces the word as "wollabyes" and how that makes my heart just melt into a pile of goo?) at bedtime. The rattle teethers are filled with Indian cooking beans for a soft, oceanic sound that are every bit as soothing to listen to as they are to chew on. Finished with a non-toxic vegetable seed wax finish, parents can rest assured that these are every bit safe for little hands and mouths.

I love the modern yet classic design of Finn + Emma's toy selection, which far exceeds these rattle teethers. Among their inventory are play gyms, stroller toys, pacifier clips and more, each one fair trade and safe for your little lovebug.

both sides now

When Carmen joined our family, I swear I felt our entire circle of friends and family let out some collective sigh of relief. There. Life was good now, again. Life was safe and warm and happy. I would again get to know the feeling of two a.m. feedings and painful exhaustion and what it's like consoling a screaming infant as your older child runs rampant through the Target aisles. There. Life was good again, regrowing where the grass was seared at the dead end.

And it was good again. Life, I mean. It was good again for the first time in a while, like the hollow wound throbbing and bleeding in my side had been properly tended to and healed and stitched to perfection with ointment to stop the ache. There is always that reflexive wince when someone calls me a mom of two, or asks if we plan on another child, or points out how fortunate I am to have "one of each" sex, or things that seem so commonplace to regular moms. It stings just subtly enough for me to always remember that I'm never going to be a regular mom again, even though I was one once.

That's sort of what grief leaves you with as some shitty consolation prize for the ringer you've survived: pieces of normalcy, but not an entire picture. There will always be one child that my body carried who will be missing from our family photographs or holiday traditions, one child not seen when well-meaning strangers inquire about the age gap between Ethan and Carmen. You don't even know the half of it, I will think as a fast-paced montage of heartbreak and diagnosis and tragedy and death and infertility and uncertainty flash before my eyes before ending with a photograph of Carmen. Oh, sweet Carmen, with her gigantic, sparkling eyes. She is the sweetness at the end, yes. She has duct taped the normalcy back into our lives so that we function like a normal family. But there are always those reminders that normalcy is a thing of the past.

Sometimes I look back at old photographs of my husband and I when we were teenagers and just making our love known. Our engagement, our wedding. The smiles and selfies-with-film-cameras and blissful naivety that comes from thinking everything would be normal because we were normal and our lives were normal and there was nothing exciting or different about us at all. There's that little feeling of invasion that happens, too. That uneasy feeling you get when your home has been robbed while you weren't home, knowing someone has been touching your stuff and invading your privacy. That feeling sort of tags along with grief, too. Something just sort of takes a piece of you and rearranges things without your permission. The security doesn't regenerate even when life becomes better again, brighter again. It's just sort of dead, too.

I always had this vision that I wanted all of the things for my children that I didn't have. I want siblings and loud, magical Christmases and birthday parties with cousins. I wanted to be a grandmother who welcomed all of my children and my many grandchildren into my home on Sundays for big, boisterous dinners. There was no guarantee of that, of course. My children could all decide to not want children, to travel the world, to settle down in a yurt in Mongolia somewhere. But there's still that piece of you that goes what if and feels the quietness of your own life and wants more, louder, bigger things. The what if is hard to lose, too. It clings to you and trumps any rational thought or logic because it is fueled by grief.

In the immortal words of Tupac Shakur, it's got you staring at the world through your rearview.

There are the nights where I cry silently in bed because the happiness tickles my bones and makes my stomach flop with eagerness and joy and a general feeling of life that I can still remember thinking was gone forever. I can still feel the sorrow so deep that breathing physically aches and you're not sure that you can trudge through another day, hour, minute because your bones shake, your joints are stiff and the exhaustion is suffocating. I've come out the other side. I've climbed out of the ravine and my muscles no longer tremble and I feel refreshed, yes. I feel happiness again. Joy in it's purest form. But there are the aches that still get you when you least expect them and I know that I'll never fully recover from the injuries but I can succeed at wearing my gameface while walking it off. It's an awkward dance, an uncomfortable balancing act that accompanies life after tragedy. The ability to see life from both sides, or something.

how the hell did we get here

There's a song by Matt Skiba & The Sekrets called How The Hell Did We Get Here? and it was probably the turning point in me realizing that Ethan was at an age where he not just listened to lyrics, but regurgitated them properly. ("Target? We're at Target? How the hell did we get here?" and other appropriately used exclamations shouted out in the correct tone when just enough people were around to hear.) "School starts next week," I lamented as usual one morning. "How did we get here already, buddy?" He was silent for a minute and then asked "how the hell did we get here?" with just enough sing-song familiarity for me to realize he was recycling lyrics I probably should have stopped letting him listen to in the car months ago.

"Good question."

Ethan decided that he wanted to attend summer camp at his gym the week before school began. "I want to stay all day," he assured me. I've realized that motherhood is very much walking a fine line between squashing the independence out of your child and desperately trying to stay sane while grappling with a terrifying reality. And so, with bursts of tears at random, I dropped Ethan off at camp. I dropped him off with a packed lunch he would eat with people who aren't me, and said goodbye and walked out the door understanding that I could not protect him for the next few hours. He says things like "I have a water bottle with my name on it and a rocket ship, what else could I need?" and he smiles so purely that I have to bite my tongue so hard to not force him to understand the harshness of the world that he has just begun to wade in.

My husband doesn't understand because he was cool. He was well-liked. He got along with everyone and liked the things other children liked, and to this day watches the television shows that other people watch. He liked sports and Rancid and politics and computers and always has something to talk about everyone with because he's well-rounded and likable and tall and handsome and can pull it together even when it feels like the world is spiraling out of control. I, on the other hand, began elementary school pretending my name was Selena Valenzuela because I'd watched La Bamba too many times (what kid loves La Bamba?) and began middle school frighteningly close to legitimately believing I was a cast member of The X-Files. In high school, I listened to emo bands with long, strung out names about being miserable and drew sad faces on my Converse with Sharpies. Ethan is a little bit more like me. Okay, he's a lot bit more like me. And so I worry.

Motherhood is also a fine line between encouraging your child to be who they are even if that means they're pretending to be an alien and wanting to drop kick the next kid who points and laughs and calls your kid weird.

I have been staying up half the night (which means binge eating bowls of sugary cereal at 2 a.m. because that's how I cope) worrying about school despite the fact he's only enrolled two days a week. And now I have been trying to put my big kid shoes on and swallow the idea of camp for a few hours each day, too. Camp is easier to digest. Ethan has been attending classes at his gym since he was eight weeks old and so his teacher is more a part of our family than people who are actually a part of our family, but still. There is a piece of me that aches when he is away from me and I'm well aware this is just the beginning. As he smiles and runs into the gym for camp, I close my eyes and can picture him slamming his bedroom door to sob away his first heartbreak or to tune me out because the perils of high school are too tedious to discuss with your mother. That's how fast life goes, isn't it? That's what grandparents are always nagging for you to understand, that life just goes so damn quickly? One day, you're twenty five years old rocking your first baby all night as he reflux-style vomits all over your hair and you cry because you don't know what you're doing and then you blink and you're waving your first baby off to Pre-K. Or camp. Or both.

How the hell did we get here?

The other day before he ran in the gate to swim class, Ethan turned around and said "I'm going to make you proud today, mommy." Already teetering on the edge of sanity from this school debacle, I felt my eyes well with tears. I realized then he will never begin to understand the depth of my pride or how devastatingly proud of him I already am and always will be. Everything he does makes the world outside of his smile seem dim and dull. He will never know how even the silliest things like playing at camp for four hours makes me feel like he's just accomplished something so big, or how when he smiles I know that there is nothing he can't do.

I'm not sure how the hell we got here already, but I do know what an honor it has been to be a part of his journey. Even if that means sobbing unapologetically into the speaker at the Starbucks drive through because there is no one in the backseat shouting "venti iced water!" when I'm trying to order my coffee.

safe sleep with nested bean: introducing the zen sack (+ giveaway)

Safe sleep is so important to me. I am constantly trying to learn more, do more and be more when it comes to spreading awareness of sleep safety. I loved swaddling my babies and knowing they were cozy and safe on their backs in their beds. Ethan remained a steady back sleeper for a lot longer than Carmen. I found that she was busting out of swaddles and rolling herself over very early on, which meant in the name of safety, I had to tuck the swaddle blankets away and look for additional safe sleeping gear. When Nested Bean contacted me about their Zen Sleep Sacks, I was excited to try one out and ultimately learn more about it.

Off the bat, there are a couple really cool features about the Zen Sack that sets it apart from other sleep sacks on the market.

The adjustable snaps. Oh, hello, gorgeous! I loved this feature. Carmen, as most preemies are, is still small for her age. Having the ability to snap the shoulder straps smaller not only helps tailor the fit to her small stature, but offers the opportunity for her to have plenty of room to grow -- and have the Zen Sack grow with her. As all moms know, it feels like we are constantly sizing up and buying new products for our babies. It's always nice to save a little bit of money and have the products grow with our little ones!

The weighted panel. Even at 5, Ethan loves to fall asleep with my hand resting on his chest or on his back. "Just hold me, mommy, until I'm asleep" is still part of our nightly routine. Not much compares to a mama's gentle, loving touch. The lightly weighted panel on the chest of the zen sack imitates a mother's touch, allowing your baby to feel comforted by you when sleeping safely on their backs in their crib.

The two way zipper. Unlike sleep sacks that zip up the center or are secured by buttons or velcro, the Zen Sack has an innovative two way zipper design. This makes diaper changes a breeze without waking a sleeping baby. As parents who cloth diaper, I like to change Carmen often and keep her dry as she sleeps. Having the ability to stealthily sneak in diaper changes without waking the sleeping baby is such a wonderful treat!

The Zen Sack comes in two size options: 3-6 months (pictured here, which Carmen opted for) and 6-12 months. The 3-6 month Zen Sack is good for babies up to 18 pounds. At 5 1/2 months, Carmen is still just over twelve pounds which means she will have plenty of room to grow into this size. Itty Bitty Carmen aside, I loved that there even was a 3-6 month option. When going through my bins and drawers of Ethan's old sleep sacks, I was frustrated that none of them seemed to be offered in sizes small enough. When you've got a feisty, super active preemie, your options are typically pretty slim. I loved that the Zen Sack begins at 10 pounds which makes it perfect for smaller movers and shakers.

Like most of the most genius products on the market, The Zen Sack was developed by a mom who knew first-hand about the importance of touch and how much young children depend on our touch to sleep soundly. I actually found the science behind the Zen Sack pretty cool (did you know many NICU's use small products to apply light pressure to the chests of babies under stress to help them sleep soundly?) and loved that these products were tested and approved by pediatric pulmonologists during development.

With a TOG level of 0.5, the Zen Sack is built for year round comfort and is made of super soft, super cozy 100% cotton. The first year can be an exhausting time for babies who are doing so much growing and developing and for the mamas who are doing so much worrying, patting, reassuring, rocking, loving -- I love that the Zen Sack can tack a few extra blissful hours of sleep on for everyone's reassurance. When your babies are sleeping safely, you, exhausted mama, are able to sleep a little more soundly! For those of you who are not quite at the sleep sack stage yet, I also encourage you to check out The Zen Swaddle. We could all use a little more zen in our lives!

The amazing, generous folks at Nested Bean have offered me the opportunity to host a giveaway for one of my readers to win a Zen Sack of their very own. Here's to some extra shut eye for a lucky winner!

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