silvermari & the stick

Note - as soon as I posted about the thank you notes we got a thank you from the most recent kid party. So not all families skip thank you notes!

I've written a few posts at my hospital's blog called The Mommy-Go-Round. I thought I'd share them here in case you'd like to read them. All my posts are here, and there will be four or five more posted. I just sent them in yesterday. Let me know what you think!

Here are links to the posts published so far, including Livia's birth story:

My Birth Story: A Successful VBAC at Woman’s Despite everything stacking up against my desire for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) – previous big baby, ultrasound estimating an even bigger baby, being overdue and having gestational diabetes – I was ultimately successful and delivered my second daughter vaginally.
Continue Reading... Gestational Diabetes Diary: The Home Stretch I’m writing this one week away from my estimated due date, so no matter what, I’m in the home stretch of t…

This is a terrible thing to b*tch about, but it's been irritating me a great deal. And what do I do with irritating things? Complain!

Jane's at an age where she's being invited to birthday parties for her classmates. If it's in our ability to attend we usually do. We missed one the weekend after Livia was born, but otherwise Jane has gone to the parties she has been invited to.

We always take a gift, and I don't mind giving a child a gift for his or her birthday. In fact, it is a pleasure (usually) to pick out something with Jane's help - either at Target or on Amazon - that the friend will like.

What I don't like is no acknowledgement of the gift. And that seems to be standard here, even among the people who insist on "yes, ma'am" and "no, sir" and their children calling me "Ms. Mari" (which I'm getting used to but still don't care for that much). The thank you notes we have received have been from families who ar…

I still love my FitBit, but its usefulness for new mamas is suspect.

During pregnancy there was an option in the dashboard to select "pregnant." I'm certain that it changed the "calories burned" and estimated I was burning more each day because I was growing a person (truth). But sometime during the pregnancy they removed that option entirely. I tweeted about it, and FitBit support tweeted back, directing me to a semi-helpful thread. It says that the "pregnancy" option didn't increase the calories burned estimate - was basically an option that served no purpose. I have no way of verifying that because the dashboard doesn't make it easy to scroll back to look. So whatever. Not a huge problem, especially because I'm not using it as a weight loss tool or really paying attention to the calorie burn. Just weird.

It also isn't very good at measuring sleep, and it thinks I'm sleeping as soon as I'm semi-still even if I'm tossing a…