Since a couple of weeks after Emerson was born, I have been writing her letters. They are more like journal entries really – written to her. I write whenever I have a chance. Sometimes a little every day. Sometimes every couple days. The entries chronicle all of the things that are going on with her, with us, with whatever really……..
It recently occurred to me that the the things that I write in her letters are often the exact same topics that would inspire me to write on my blog…..the point of view is just different. So, here I am, killing two birds with one stone. This has official become the lazy wo(man’s) blog. I am just going to cut and paste a couple of excerpts.
Written Friday April 17th, 2009
THE MILK COMA
This comment falls under the “Things I Love About Motherhood” category. Sometimes when you are nursing you get sleepy. Each phase of sleepy nursing should actually get its own subtitle, but in order to expedite the storytelling process, I will smush them all under one. First, your eyes slowly, ever so slowly, start to close. This is one of my favorite things about nursing you: watching your eyes go from all round and big – peering at me over my boob….and then the lids start to slowly droop…..it is so adorable it should be illegal. Next, you will sort of flop your top arm back behind your body. You sort of look like a drunk frat boy that fell asleep on the floor of the bathroom. It doesn’t look comfortable at all, but your body is totally relaxed, like a bean bag in the shape of a baby. Finally, if you have really fallen asleep, my nipple sort of just falls out of your mouth. It is too funny. Which brings us to the culmination of cuteness, the acme of adorable – the milk coma. You are all passed out and I pick you up to put you on my shoulder to burp you. You sort of grimace, groan, and stretch that baby back-arching stretch. Our faces are so close together that I have to strain my eyes sideways to really see you. You breathe your warm milky breath into my face. It is the best thing ever. Sometimes you stay asleep and sometimes it is a mini-coma and it only lasts for a few minutes, but it is some of my favorite time with you. It is so sweet that it makes me sad for everyone that doesn’t get to experience it on a daily basis.
p.s. It is 10:20 pm, and you are still sleeping. Hallelujah! Daddy is going to be so proud of us when he gets home.
Written Sunday April 19th, 2009:
HAPPY BABY
Over the past couple of weeks, it has been my great relief to discover that you are NOT the grumpiest baby that was every born. In fact, you smile quite often. Since you got the hang of the muscles in your cheeks, the smiles have been frequent and fabulous. You smile the most consistently for your Daddy. Whenever you see him, he gets a big one, often accompanied by your “silent laughing face,” the face where you look like you are laughing, but no sound comes out of your mouth. You have also been cooing and “talking” a lot, which is painfully adorable and reduces me to a big lump of baby talking mush.
Through the first couple of months, your father and I (okay, mostly me) were worried that you might never smile and that you would spend your entire life, starting from birth, being morose and unhappy. This would have been a difficult fate, but we would have loved and supported you anyway; although, it would have been very difficult to find black delinquent punk rocker baby clothes – they just don’t make them, and even if they do, they definitely don’t sell them in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
You may still become one of those pessimistic poetic preteens (How is that for alliteration? KAPOW! Or should I say PAPOW?) that will wander around wearing an oversized black sweatshirt hoodie and black eyeliner, whilst carrying a journal, and The Complete Anthology of Sylvia Plath. But since the wonderful emergence of your sunny adorable smile, it is not a 100% certainty and even if it does happen, at least it isn’t starting NOW. Thank you God. While I think that I can work my way up to handling your inevitable “angsty angry years,” I am grateful that I will have a good 12 or so years to work my way up to them. What is that story about boiling a frog? You have to put the frog in cold water and SLOWLY turn up the heat. Thanks for turning down the water a little bit. Mommy really appreciates it.
Filed under: Baby Momma
Babies are supposed to sleep. A lot.
During Emerson’s first two weeks, she lived up to this expectation. She slept a lot. Although we knew better, Troy and I thought that maybe we just had one of those “easy” babies.
But then, on the morn of the 15th day…..she woke up……and was she ever AWAKE.
The child has a deeply rooted aversion to the daytime nap.
I have been reading a lot of stuff (books, Internet….) on sleep schedules, naps, infant REM cycles, you name it. There are common annoyances that run through the vast majority of what I have read:
1. Each opinion is THE opinion. Proponents of the “scheduled” baby are the “schedule Nazis.” Proponents of the “free feeding, free napping baby” are the “free feeding, free napping Nazis.” You get the picture.
2. All of the advice seems to have the little note (either literal or implied) at the end. * Everything mentioned above will work, unless….well….it doesn’t, because your baby is “special.”
3. This one I find to be the most annoying of all: they never tell you HOW to get your baby to sleep. They go on and on about the details of the schedule….blah blah blah…..baby eats for precisely 15.3 minutes on each breast, then baby is awake for exactly 45 minutes and 17 seconds of “quiet alert time”, then the baby sleeps for 1.5 hours……blah blah blah……It is imperitive that the baby goes to bed between 6 and 7 pm. If they do not, they will grow a second head and develop a strange and disturbing fungal disease….blah blah blah…….infants should get at least three daytime naps a day, totaling at least 9 hours of sleep time…..blah blah blah……BUT THEY NEVER TELL YOU HOW TO GET YOUR BABY TO SLEEP (and perhaps more importantly, how to get your baby to STAY asleep)!
Although it has been very challenging, things do seem to be getting better.
Weeks 3-7 there was little to no daytime sleeping, exacerbated by the incredible prevalence of daytime crying, the volume of which increased dramatically if you tried to put her down – EVER. This made me want to jump off a cliff or lock myself in the bathroom for the rest of eternity. Fortunately, sometime during week 7 we turned a little corner, and things started to get better.
We are now coming to the end of week 10, and for the past week we have had about a 60-70% success rate for SOME type of daytime nap. Today and yesterday weren’t great days for the afternoon nap, but the previous three days we got a very solid 2.5 hour nap in the early afternoon. I don’t think I can adequately describe what a cosmic triumph this is. It makes me want to dance up and down the streets of Fort Wayne kissing and hugging strangers, and I don’t even like strangers. That is how excited I get for a REAL nap.
A “Real Nap” would be defined as a nap with a duration of more than an hour, where the baby sleeps in his/her own bed. Things that do not count as “Real Naps” in the Baeten dictionary: falling asleep on a parent and then waking up when the parent moves, or heaven forbid, attempts to put said baby down, falling asleep in a car seat and then waking up when the parent stops the car, moves the car seat, or heaven forbid, removes said baby from the car seat, falling asleep in a baby carrier and then waking up…..you get the picture.
Right now, I am writing with Mimi sleeping soundly in the baby Bjorn (the baby carrier that straps to your front – and as one of our friends so colorfully described, “makes you look like the baby carrying version of a transformer”). This is after three attempts to lie her down in her bed…..I suppose some sleep is better than no sleep.
Side note: You are supposed to be able to carry up to a 25 pound baby in the baby Bjorn. I want to know what hulk of a mommy can carry around a 25 lb. baby in this thing. Mimi is coming up on 14 lbs, and it is already pretty darn hard on my back. These Swedish mommies must be LARGE women.
Filed under: Baby Momma
Today is a triumphant day because I fit into my “fat pants.” They are the one pair of “bigger” pants I bought when I was pregnant before I realized that I should just give in and buy maternity clothes (which are much more comfortable when you are growing in the disproportionate way that pregnancy makes you grow).
The physical ramifications of pregnancy are unfair in an unfathomable number of ways. Obviously there is the whole pregnancy thing…..40 weeks that are like bad joke after bad joke of physical malady…..written by a bald, fat, cigar smoking, Republican man. Then there is the actual delivery, which suggests a serious design flaw. We definitely should have meeting with the appropriate people/cosmic forces on that one.
But it doesn’t end there! So here you are, a new mother, just trying to SURVIVE (and I mean that in a completely literal sense, there is no metaphorical or figurative connotation to that comment) the first couple of months of motherhood. On the side, you are trying (though be it in a rather distracted and not very committed way), to drop some of those baby pounds…..and maybe, just maybe, be able to wear something other than jammies, sweatpants, or your maternity clothes. Your pre-pregnancy wardrobe silently and viciously taunts you every day……. And somehow, praise the Lord, somehow, the pounds do start to slowly peel away.
Here’s the kicker. The numbers on the scale have been re-calibrated since your pre-pregnancy days. Even if you get to your pre-pregnancy weight, your post-pregnancy SIZE is still bigger….quite a bit BIGGER. Right now, I am within 5 pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight; however, 5 pounds now does not mean the same thing as 5 pounds THEN. Your bones have shifted and spread, your muscle has disintegrated, and your fat has redistributed. So 5 pounds now is more like 10 or 15 pounds THEN.
When I originally bought the “fat pants” I was at least 10 or 15 pounds over my normal weight. Now I am within 5 pounds, and they don’t fit as well as when I bought them…..how is THIS fair?
I am definitely adding this to my growing list of “things they don’t tell you when you get pregnant.” If you haven’t been pregnant yet……now you know.
