Jenna Glatzer, Ghostwriter

Oh, yeah, and a PS to my last post: the whole publishing world played musical chairs while I was off in babyland. Two of my favorite agents have left publishing altogether (one's opening a retail store and the other is in nursing school), one of my favorite editors moved houses and I found out only by accident, another is now a freelance writer... I know I was out of the loop for a while, but was it really that long? Who moved my cheese? (I actually have no idea if that's an appropriate use of that phrase, seeing as I've never read the book. It just felt right.)

I didn't expect it to be this hard to reconcile motherhood and writing. I figured all along that I was so lucky to be in the position I'm in-- I work from home and make my own schedule, so I always thought I'd be able to continue fairly easily once baby arrived. I've hesitated to write a post like this, because it brings up another issue bloggers face: my editors could read this. My editors could read this and think, "She's not going to be committed to her work." But for the past 7 years, I've been telling the truth about my career and what I know about publishing in the hopes that it might help other writers, and I don't want to give that up now because it's a riskier topic. So I'll tell it. Somewhere around halfway through my pregnancy, I stopped actively looking for work. I continued the projects I was already contracted for, and took on some small work here and there, but took a "wait and see" approach to the bigger work. I d...

I can't believe this is happening again, but it is. Parents, if you haven't already, check out this handy toy recall finder . Mattel has announced its third recall this summer for lead paint in children's toys. This time it's Barbie accessories, Geo Trax locomotive toys, and Big, Big World 6-in-1 Bongo Band drums. I was blissfully unaware of how poorly regulated products for children are until I had a baby of my own. Now I'm just mad. Bottles, sippy cups, and breast pumps that leach toxic chemicals (BPA) into baby's milk, botullism in baby food, lead paint in toys... Sarina's just 6 months old, and these things have all happened just since she's been born. Mums The Word is collecting comments to send to the FDA, and they're promoting Natural Pod , a company that manufactures wooden and natural textile toys and clothing for babies and kids. I hope this is the end of the lead paint recalls. Somehow I fear there's much more to come.

Ooooh, I so want to win this. If you do, too, hurry on over before 10:00 tonight. It's a Strawberry Fields Forever sling from Rockin' Baby , and the contest is here . And in keeping with the theme, here's a new Sarina-n-me pic with our wrap on.

Clearly, the child is going to be the sort who needs the gauntlet to be thrown down before she acts. As if to mock my second to last post, she has decided to hit all her milestones at once (like astonwest's niece). Three days before her 6-month birthday, she sat up by herself. No real warning. I didn't think she was ready to do it. But she did it-- and then stuck her arms in the air and bellowed "Aaahhhhhh!" in a victory cry. Two days later, she started kneeling. The next day, she stood up in her crib (and gave Mom a case of the vapors. Mom was about to get in the shower, saw vertical legs in the video monitor, and ran in to see what was going on-- promptly scaring the heck out of the poor baby, who bit down hard on the crib rail that she was gumming). Today, she crawled. She crawled! At Aunt Michelle and future Uncle Jimmy's house. She had been in a crabby mood most of the day, but made up for it about an hour before we went home, when she began crawling to reach...

1. When I touch her nose and shout, "BOOP!" 2. When I talk like Donald Duck. 3. When I lie on my back and put her on my knees and help her "fly." 4. When I kiss her feet. 5. When I raspberry or kiss her belly. 6. When I whisper "shooshooshooshoo" and turn my head back and forth (um, maybe you have to see this one in person. It's a laugh riot). 7. When Anthony sings "Cotton Eyed Joe." 8. When she's sucking her pacifier and I pretend to suck the handle end. 9. When I imitate the way she grabs my face and slobbers on my cheek. 10. When I use hand puppets. 11. When I lie behind the cat and pretend the cat is saying "BEEP." 12. When I kiss from cheek to cheek as fast as I can a quazillion times. 13. When I slap my face like the Home Alone poster. 14. When I make it look like any toy is flying toward her nose. 15. When I quietly pop up on the side of her crib, surprising her. 16. When I move her around in a circle, imitating a ferris ...

Sarina was so ahead of schedule for her first three months-- she was holding in her own pacifier on day three, reliably flipping over from back to front and holding up her head by month three, vocalizing, holding on to toys, and so on-- that nothing could have surprised me. Walking and speaking in full sentences by six months? Sure. By month four, when she was rocking back and forth and hurling herself around the room by dragging her head while she quasi-crawled, we all took bets on how much longer it would be until she really crawled. My bet was three more days; no one bet longer than two weeks. But here we are, closing in on six months, and she's actually made no progress since then. She also makes exactly the same vocalizations as she did at three months. No consonants. Just a steady stream of "ahhhh"s and "eh"s and the occasional "ooh." She doesn't sit up well, even with pillows. She doesn't "razz" or mimic my faces. (On the other...

Dawno asked for them. And what Dawno wants, Dawno gets. (I fear her sparkly powers.) And this one's for psychic Amy Derby, who predicted a few posts ago that Sarina would crawl backwards first. The next day, I took this: Yep, that's Sarina stuck under the couch. How she accomplished that is beyond me. More photos coming soon. Oh, and by the way, no one ever told me how absolutely tear-your-heart-out miserable it is when your child gets her first injury... on your watch. Sarina is still trying her darnedest to crawl, and she's very mobile now (even if the crawling isn't technically accurate). She sort of just hurls herself forward, dragging her head most of the time. Or she gets up all the way with her butt in the air, leans forward, flops down, and repeats until she reaches the desired toy. Like this: Anyway, she was doing this and getting too close to her Pack & Play, so I was spotting her and putting my hand over the plastic bottom piece. Then she suddenly changed...

Thanks to my friend Dawn Colclasure at Palms to Pines , who recently gave me the Courageous Blogging award. I now get the honor of passing it on, which I am about to do. I hereby bequeath this award to three lovely ladies: The first goes to Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware , because they kick ass. It's no easy matter sticking your neck out to protect writers the way they do every day. Thanks, literary superheroes. The second goes to Meryl K. Evans, who has a Bionic Ear Blog , where she detailed her progress when she got a cochlear implant, and has since blogged about CI issues in general there. I found it very interesting reading, and have always been glad she gave us a chance to take that personal journey with her.

All last week, I called in to a radio station to win tickets to an event where Mandy Moore would sing a few songs, then mingle with the crowd signing autographs and answering questions. The event was called "Martinis with Mandy." I was so goofy with excitement when I won that the DJ asked me how old I was, because he was pretty sure I was a kid who could not drink martinis with Mandy. Yeah, my voice does that. I have to consciously NOT sound like a 12-year-old, particularly when I'm excited. I don't have a high-pitched voice, but for whatever reason, it sounds young. This is one of the reasons I'm wary of doing radio interviews. But anyway. I've admired Mandy Moore since A Walk to Remember . Didn't know her early albums, which is apparently a good thing, because she thinks they were pretty lousy. Her latest, though, Wild Hope, is a folk album. That's my stuff. So today was the big day and I, of course, brought my brother-- best audience member in the w...

She's sleeping through the niiiiiight! Extra exclamation points all around!!! O joyous day! This is her, practicing her pout. I'm still staying up half the night, though, because I have several more books to read for the Writer's Digest Self-Published Books competition in the next couple of weeks. I guess I thought I was a faster reader than I am; it's taking me a long time to get through them. It's worth it, though. I really like the idea that at least one book is going to get plucked out of relative obscurity and get some big attention. I interviewed a fellow a couple of years back who won the contest and wound up with a 2-book deal with-- HarperCollins, I think. I keep hoping the big winner will be one of the ones in my pile, though the odds of that are low (there are thousands of entries; I'm reading about 65 of them).

I'll tell you the single most frustrating thing I've encountered as a new mom: hand-washing and the arguments that ensue over it. No, seriously. As I've learned in various places, one of the most important things you can do to protect a baby is to make sure that anyone who handles her washes his or her hands first. So I do my best to uphold that. And I'm sad to say that after four months, I'm still having the same arguments with people. I have no idea what's so difficult or traumatic about hand-washing, but there are people-- in my family-- who are determined never to do it. And who manage to seem freshly shocked each time I ask for it. (What? I'm supposed to wash my hands? I washed them last week when I came to visit! Isn't that good enough?) There are also people who can't seem to resist saying patronizing things after hearing me ask someone to wash his or her hands. The most common one is: I can tell you're a first-time mom. or It's becaus...

There's a lot of stuff no one tells you about pregnancy until it's too late. I have run headlong into the latest one this week: somewhere around month 3 of your baby's life, YOU GO FRICKIN' BALD. I had learned that you lose hair after giving birth, but thought that was no big deal because you actually hold onto a lot of hair during pregnancy, making it super-full. I had great pregnancy hair. Only fair to lose it afterwards, I figured. But no. I'm not just losing the extra hair I gained. I have two actual, factual bald spots now, right above my temples. The rest of my hair is breaking and looks horribly damaged and thin all of a sudden, so I went ahead and did the cliched thing-- I got a "mom cut." I didn't mean to. The stylist actually apologized while cutting it. And it looks... bad. That's the sad thing about hair-- it takes so long to grow it back if you want it long (and I do). I need to cut it even shorter to get past the damaged parts, but it...

This is one of those deflating moments you never really think about when you're in the honeymoon stage of book publishing-- you know, the time between when you sign the contract and the first month or so after the book comes out. Those months are so full of possibilities. Then, there you are five years later with an unearned-out advance and a statement showing that you've managed to lose money in the last 6 months. How, you ask? Simple: the number of returns exceed the number of sales. "Returns" doesn't mean that a customer returned the book. It means that the book was sitting around on the bookstore shelf and someone who works in the bookstore finally decided it was just taking up space there and probably would never sell, so they get to return it to the publisher for full credit at any time. I guess some of those stores have been hanging onto the book for the full five years. Nice of them, really. Anyway, there does come a point-- maybe after the first two or t...

I'm actually two pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight, yet there's still this jolly little belly hanging around. I had refused to buy jeans in a bigger size because I was sure I'd be back to normal soon enough, but I gave in yesterday. Now I have fatty jeans. I also ordered a corset on eBay. What, me exercise? Pfaw! So it's been three and a half months since I became Momma Jenna, and I still can't get anything done. The advice I got most often when I was pregnant was, "Sleep when the baby sleeps." As I think I mentioned a few posts ago, that's not always possible when you're a "pumper." When she sleeps, I break out the breast pump. Then I have to wash it and get the bottles ready for the next time. And even though it sounds lovely to follow the advice of all the magazines that say things like, "The dishes can wait! Just take a nap!", they can't always wait. Eventually, you run out of things to eat on. So the practical truth...

First off, you'll be thrilled to hear, I'm sure, that the day after I posted my reviews, we picked up a pack of Pampers Swaddlers and haven't looked back. What a huge difference! The blowout ratio has gone way down and Mommy doesn't feel like retching nearly as often. We also got a new (well, new to us) swing for her on Craigslist. It's the Fisher-Price Ocean Wonders Aquarium one, and boy, is it nice. She looks so comfy in it, and is very interested in the lights and mobile. But you really just want to see the pictures, don't you? Can't blame you. Here you go!

First off, she's doing great. Still growing at an unbelievable rate (she's 3 months old and now the size of an average 6-month-old). Not sleeping through the night yet, though I hear rumors that this honestly reallyo trulio will happen one day ("Someday my sleep will come..."). Drooling a whole lot. Smiling and laughing. Making her mom melt. There are two main comments people make when meeting her: 1. She's huge! and 2. She's so fair! Both of these are surprises, as we're short and Italian. Well, Anthony's half Polish, which is where we assume the fair complexion and light hair comes from. She still lacks eyebrows, too. She looks darker in most photographs than she is, so I'll have to find one that's truer to life. She's the only person in the world who can make ME look tan (I'm mostly translucent). And now for our product roundup. While I was pregnant, I joined a pregnancy board where women talked about their "must-have" prod...

People hate it when you defend celebrities. I am of the very unpopular opinion that celebrities are human beings, and that those human beings should be treated with at least the same respect we'd give a bank teller or grocery check-out person or postal worker. I've been so dismayed about the way people in the media and people "on the street" have treated Sanjaya from American Idol. Here's the thing: He's a 17-year-old kid with a nice voice. He was outclassed on American Idol, sure. But it's not his fault that he was chosen for the show, and not his fault that people voted to keep him in week after week. What blew my mind was the hatred. It's one thing to say you don't think he's as talented as the other contestants... it's another to have headline after headline when he was eliminated that say "Finally!" and "It's About Time!" and to continue rubbing salt in the wound by talking about the idiocy of those who voted f...

I'd just like to note here that as of week 5 of Sarina's life, she had already outgrown her newborn stuff and is now wearing the size 3-6-month clothes. She's 11 pounds now, and 25 inches long, and at the rate she's eating, I think she's trying very hard to become a giant (or at least more roly poly). No wonder I'm having a hard time keeping up with her-- I finally tracked it, and she drinks 36 ounces of milk per day. "Normal" consumption for a baby is 19 to 30 ounces. I'm starting to get back to work now, albeit slowly. I got the page proofs of a book on bullying that I co-wrote, so while she sleeps, I go through with my trusty red pen and mark the corrections. There are some pretty awful typos in the table of contents (which my coauthor and I didn't write), and this version went out to reviewers. I'm a bit embarrassed. Of course, it says "Uncorrected Galley Proofs" on the cover, but as a reviewer, I've seen that before and s...

This is a post about breastfeeding, so if that sort of thing ooks you out, this is fair warning that it's best to skip it. I was lucky enough to have read a lot about breastfeeding troubles toward the end of my pregnancy, so I was mentally prepared for it to be more difficult than one might expect. I mean, I have breasts, the baby has a mouth... what's so hard? But I had read so many stories from mothers who felt terrible anguish when things didn't go well, and I promised myself I wouldn't do that. I thought, "I'm going to try my best, and if it doesn't work out, it's okay to use formula." I found it funny that there were whole societies dedicated to breastfeeding. I found out that two old friends of mine were very active in La Leche League, and I wondered, "What in the world is there to talk about that these women would actually go to meetings-- regularly-- to bond with other breastfeeding women?" A couple of lessons, okay, but an actual...