My MacBook is temporarily dead, and with it goes my ability to post pictures easily. The laptop is in the Apple repair process right now. Thank FSM I bought the extended warranty because the most recent repair apparently involves replacing the motherboard.

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If you haven’t noticed, updates to this ‘blog have slowed considerably. Like every working mom before me, I am struggling to achieve work-life balance. Fiber hobbies and ‘blog updates were the first things to fly out the window. (I can knit a little on the bus or while the baby nurses, but that is about it.) I spend 2 to 3 hours every weekday with the baby, and my other hours rotate around working, cooking, cleaning, and, surprisingly, sleeping.

I wondered for a while why I was more tired now than pre-baby, even though I get roughly the same amount of sleep per night. I eventually realized that I was always “on” – I don’t stop to read or knit or browse teh Internets, instead I am frantically chopping vegetables for tomorrow’s meal, folding laundry, writing thank you letters (my god, people are generous when you have a baby, it is sort of stunning), vacuuming, sewing more diapers, grocery shopping, paying bills and filling out reimbursement forms, washing bottle parts, etc, until I fall over.(*)

In addition to being physically busy, there is more to think about – meal planning (god, how I hate meal planning – and with breastfeeding, I am always hungry [I joke that I am like a Hobbit, I have second breakfast and sometimes second lunch or second dinner]), making sure Charlie Cat gets his insulin shots on time and is not vomiting because he loves his new “kitty Atkins” food (low-carb, prescription only, so expensive, sigh) so much that he chuffs it down as fast as possible and then sometimes pukes it back up, how to slowly replace my work wardrobe (postpregnancy, my feet, waist, and boobs are bigger, necessitating replacement of every damn category of work clothing), being mindful of a schedule for pumping milk, getting back into the medical editing groove (it’s coming back to me slowly, but I can tell that I’ve forgotten a lot), and of course, thinking idle Mommy thoughts about the baby and wondering how she is doing.

All that is to say, I am not complaining. (Although, it would be nice if my hair stopped falling out already.) I am absurdly happy. Life feels so full, so rich. Being the parent of an infant is better than I ever dared hope. Right now, the house is vacuumed, the toys are mostly organized, the fridge is full of tasty leftovers, and the laundry is folded and put away. (OK, the master bathroom definitely is still dirty. And the garden and yard sorely need weeding.) I miss interacting with the fiber community and wistfully look forward to resuming my hobbies again, but I wouldn’t trade my life today for anything.

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(*) Lest anyone think that Matt’s life hasn’t changed, I want to emphasize that he is doing a lot more, too. He is the one settling the overtired baby while I am doing other tasks, he does all of the baby pick-up and drop-offs, and he spends every lunch hour at the day care (the employees there have remarked approvingly about his dedication). Matt takes care of nearly all of Charlie’s evening injections and feedings, does most of the litter and kitty vomit cleanup, and runs numerous errands on my behalf.

My sister and her long-time boyfriend are now engaged! I’ve been waiting to hear this news for more than a year. :D

They visited us a couple weekends ago to meet Meredith and soak up some Minn-eh-SOH-tah culture.

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We had a get-together over Labor Day weekend, and I decided to make lemon-glazed madeleines.

The recipe is from David Lebovitz, and it is just fantastic! I finally got to use the madeleine mold that Matt and I received as a WEDDING GIFT (back in 2004), and it was worth the wait. This recipe makes 24 cookies (or slightly less, depending on how full you fill the molds).

Cake
3 large eggs, at room temperature
2/3 cup (130g) granulated sugar
rounded 1/8 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cup (175g) flour
1 teaspoon baking powder (optional)
zest of one small lemon
9 tablespoons (120g) unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature

Glaze
1 1/2 cup (300g) powdered sugar
2 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice
4 tablespoons water

Heat oven to 425 F. Spray the madeleine mold with PAM+flour (or brush with melted butter and dust with flour).

Beat eggs, sugar, and salt for 5 minutes (frothy and thickened). It will be light in color.

Whisk the flour and baking powder to aerate, fold in small batches into the eggs.

Add lemon zest to cooled butter, slowly dribble butter into batter as you fold just until incorporated.

Fill each mold to ~3/4 full. Plop the batter in the center, do not spread. Bake for 8 or 9 minutes (a tich longer if you use the baking powder). Meanwhile, make the glaze by stirring together all ingredients until smooth.

Remove cakes from the oven, move to a cooling rack. While they are still warm, dip each cake in glaze (submerge, really), and remove the excess. DL recommends using a dull knife to scrape off the excess glaze, but I found it more efficient to do it with my fingers. Return cakes to the cooling rack to allow the glaze to set.

Note: DL recommends chilling the batter and freezing the mold before baking. This (afaik) is to promote the formation of the “hump” in the center of the cake. I didn’t care so much about the look, so I skipped that step.

We had some bad news this week. My Charlie cat has diabetes.

A few weeks after Meredith was born, Matt and I noticed that Charlie was starting to look awfully skinny. We weren’t sure if it was just his neurotic behavior (he truly seemed dismayed to see that I was home all day long and yet had little time for him) or if it was something else. We tried changing his food from diet food, which he’d been eating for the past 8 or so years, to regular food, but that only gave him gastrointestinal troubles. Last week, he went to the vet, who suspected from his weight loss (from 16.x lbs last year to 10.x lbs!) that he either had diabetes or a thyroid disorder. So. Blood tests showed diabetes. Dammit.

The vet indicated that cats who are diagnosed early and treated promptly may go into remission. If we are lucky, Charlie’s blood glucose might be controlled through diet alone (after a few months of twice-daily insulin injections). Matt does not believe this is a death sentence, and neither do I. But it sure sucks.

Oh, and since Charlie and James returned from the vet visit (James seems healthy, hurrah), they are fighting like crazy again. We are doing another round of kitty rehab (forced togetherness with supervision, separated while we are out of the house). Tough times.

In other bad pet news, my so-ugly-and-yet-so-cool plecostomos passed on 2 weeks ago. We came back from a vacation in NJ (introducing Meredith to the in-law clan, donchaknow) to find a 9″ skeleton in the tank. It must have died early during our time away to be so thoroughly skeletonized by our return. I’d had this fish since I was a graduate student in 1998, it was a tiny 1″ baby when I brought it home. This fish used to make “party streamer” poop all around the tank and was the source of much hilarity. It moved with me from New Jersey to Massachusetts to Minnesota over the past decade. So sad to not have that guy around anymore.