Walk-Up Living. Or, An Ode To The Sling

We, like many Brooklynites, live in a walk-up. Still, our two bedroom apartment with its leaky faucets and over exuberant winter heating system (can we say steam heat=sauna) comes at a pretty penny--three times the rent, in fact, that we paid for our 3 bedroom full bath Charlottesville, VA place.

But committed we are to city living. Or rural living. (Its the suburbs that I find soul-crushing.)

Now that the bambino is home, I'm finding those three sets of stairs create untold obstacles to my daily living. Sure, I have a great stroller.* But getting it up and down the stairs with baby in one arm? Yeah right.

That's where this wonderful thing called the sling comes in. Unlike the Ergo, which I also own and shall write about shortly, the sling is super fast and easy to put on. Slip it over one arm, slide the baby into the pocket and away we go.

And days when MAS won't stop crying? After I've bounced on the exercise ball for over an hour and STILL no sleep for the preemie-liscous boy? Why, the sling: slide him in and my hands are free to say read a book or sweep the floor--or GASP, write a blogpost.

* The Mountain Buggy, while fab, is friggin' heavy.

Chicco KeyFit 30: Fit For A Shrimp

The Shrimpster, in his Chicco Keyfit with Infant Insert


I was a little anal about my baby registry, I have to admit. Part of it was that I was so flummoxed by the number of choices and chagrined by the implication that if I made the wrong choice I’d be a BAD MOTHER that I researched the pants off of everything. That, and I tend to over research things in general. (I even had a spreadsheet of items I wanted! Color coded! And cross referenced!)

Anyhoo, when MAS was born three months early that whole process sort of got dropped. Funny, that. I’d researched everything online, you see, and hadn’t had a chance to really visit the babychain stores to see the crap in real life. (More on that later when we talk about strollers & citylife.)

Plus, it seemed like every time we started preparing for MAS's arrival something bad happened. What do I mean? Paint the babies room: go into preterm labor & deliver 12 weeks early. Order the crib: baby gets NEC and has to go on a triple course of antibiotics for ten days and is fed through an IV.

Scary shit, no? Sorta makes you superstitious, no?

And then there's the fact that our needs and priorities shifted a bit: preemies are a special case. Especially super shrimpy preemies like MAS. For Chrissake, he just barely hit 4 lbs 12 oz when we brought him home so the Graco SafeSeat I’d registered for sure as hell wasn’t going to cut it. (The SafeSeat is only good for babies 5 lbs and over...)

The only car seat that could really fit him was the Chicco Keyfit 30, which I begrudgingly registered for even though it was more expensive than the Graco and didn’t fit the SnugGlider that I REALLY wanted. (A swing! And it vibrates! And is so small I could fold it and slide it under the sofa! A Brooklynite's dream, really...)

But boy was I wrong. I love this car seat, if love is a word that can really be applied to something like a car seat. It was a breeze to install because its got a spring-assisted level foot, bubble levels, and “Center-Pull” adjustment. And it fits babies 4 to 30 lbs and has these latches on the side so I can use it in our car, in a car service car or even a Taxi—from the day he came home from the NICU until he’s like 2. So MAS is pretty much set.

Luckily it also fits my Mountain Buggy Stroller Car Seat Adapter and Kolcraft Universal Car Seat frame—the latter of which, annoyingly, was stolen from my apartment building’s vestibule. (But also luckily: Brooklyn thieves are stupid: they stole the cheap stroller!)

Things I Wish I'd Known About Having A Preemie

MAS @ 29 weeks

If you learn your baby’s nurses’ names and use them your infant will get better treatment.

You’ll alternately resent and revere your baby’s nurses.

No one really knows what to say to you. Not even your own parents.

Kangaroo care works.

The more you visit, the more your baby thrives. Even if he doesn’t seem to react at all, he knows you’re there: he recognizes your voice.

You’ll always wonder if there’s something you could have done to prevent giving birth prematurely.

Sometimes it will help to live day by day, other times week by week.

You’ll come to crave the visitor who fawns over how beautiful your baby is no matter how tiny or how many wires and tubes he’s hooked up to because they see what you see: a spectacularly precious life.

You’ll come to love changing your baby’s diaper because its one of the few times you’re permitted to interact with him.

For the first few months—maybe even year—of your preemie’s life you’ll feel sadness and regret and envy and even a little guilt when you see someone in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Your feelings will embarrass and shame you, but denying them will only make them more powerful.

In your mind, your preemie will always have two birthdays: the day he was born and the day he should have been born.

After He Peed Into His Own Mouth...

MAS is my first baby. And while I read up as much as I could during my seven month pregnancy, there are some things book learnin’ just can’t prepare you for: like the way little boys love to pee whenever their genitals are exposed. A little pee never hurt anyone I figure, so I’ve been occasionally remembering to cover him up with a wipe during a diaper change and occasionally forgetting… At which point I either change him or just swab both of us down and go with it. But yesterday, on our stroll around the hood—christ! It was 60 degrees!—I saw this thing called a wee blocker at Area Kids on Montague Street here in Brooklyn. (I think you can also buy it at One Step Ahead.) It’s basically a cloth egg that fits right over his penis. (Machine washable of course.) It works like charm. Necessary? Nah. But for ten bucks he looks awful cute & we both stay dry.



(And yes, he did pee into his own mouth once. But you know it really didn’t seem to bother him as much as you might think…)

Wanna Know More About Us?

Our story begins with an ending.

I was in the process of recovering from a particularly traumatic miscarriage--11.5 weeks! lots of blood! everywhere!--when my husband Ebronis and I planned trip to the Left Coast. Our best friend and my sister both live in the Bay Area and so to keep our minds off our grief we scheduled a two week getaway around the Memorial Day holiday.

We spent a relaxing four days with said best friend & his now fiancé at Mar Vista Cottages in a little town called Anchor Bay, smack dab between Gualala and Mendocino along the Northern California coast, followed by a couple of days in Davis with my sister and her girlfriend. Much to our surprise, a few days after returning to Brooklyn in the beginning of June we discovered we were pregnant with MAS. A blessing? Yes. A surprise? You betcha. (After all, it took us over a year to conceive the first time and here it had only been two wrenching months since the miscarriage.)

We were grateful. And scared. So we spent the remainder of the summer waiting anxiously for the first trimester to pass without a hitch. Which it did. The second trimester passed without a hitch as well.

But the third trimester?

Ah, that’s another story entirely. At 27 weeks I went into preterm labor without warning and after 5 days of hospital bedrest delivered MAS via emergency c-section. He weighed 2 lbs 5 oz.

The miscarriage and premature birth, our doctors told us, were not related. We had bad luck is all.

After 66 frightening days in the NICU we finally brought MAS home to our Brooklyn Heights apartment. Our three cats, who all outweighed him by about 9 lbs, begrudgingly let him stay. For now.