A Tribute To Fritter

Tags

baby, development, peekaboo, seven months, social referencing

Poor Fritter.

When Owl was a baby I posted constant updates on his many advances and progress, while Fritter has gotten almost no blog attention. But I promise that the neglect is only in writing. I enjoy her so much that it is ridiculous, and I want to really introduce her to you.

She is seven months old now.

She can roll around, eat solid food, and say “ba ba ba”. She creeps around on her belly but she still can’t sit up completely independently. Her growth is perfectly on the 50th percentile, making her much bigger than Owl was at the same age but nicely average. She actually wore 6 months clothes at 6 months, can you believe that? Some of the clothes are handmedowns from Owl, which he wore at 9 months.  She sleeps better than Owl did but still wakes up multiple times in the night.

But that’s all just data. It doesn’t tell you who Fritter is.

I love this ridiculous, derpy little baby.

Fritter is a people watcher. She especially loves to watch her brother’s antics, and she gets a big grin on her face when he comes into view. A game of peekaboo with him will have her laughing out loud.

She  doesn’t laugh out loud super often, though. Her laugh is a rare and delightful thing. Usually she just grins, or if you give her kisses or blow raspberries at her she chortles.

She loves dogs. My friend the Farm Fairy has a puppy who is only 2 weeks older than Fritter and they are great friends. I’ve taken her to a couple of dog training appointments, too, and she just grins at the dog and watches everything quietly.

Her smile blooms.

It starts out just gently tugging at the corners of her mouth, and then slowly grows over her whole face, until the emotion overwhelms her and she has to hide it, usually in my chest if she’s in the carrier, otherwise behind her own arms or behind a blankie.

She loves to cover her face and eyes. She rubs her “Sleepy Sheep” all over her face as soon as we hand it to her. She will cover her face with the sheep blanket, or a curtain, or anything she can get her hands on and wait for us to say “Where’s Fritter?” and then she whips it off of her face with a big grin.

She is definitely shyer of strangers than Owl is, and she’s a little overattached to me. And by “a little overattached” I mean that she bursts into tears when I leave the room, or if I hand her to anybody, including her own father.

I think part of this is nature, and part of this is nurture. I think she is naturally a little more easily frightened. She went through a period when she was 2-3 months old where the slightest unexpected sound, even if it was just her father coughing or someone speaking when the room had gone silent, was enough to throw her into an angry pout followed by a protesting cry.

This is an unfortunate situation when you have an active five year old and a dog in the house. Every bark, every shout would send her into a fit of fear-rage.

Thankfully she has adjusted a bit, and now only does her angry pout if a genuinely startling noise happens.

On the other hand, she hasn’t been as well socialized as Owl in some ways.

Sure, she sees people more often  than Owl did at that age, since she comes along to drop off and pick up at school, and on many play dates. I didn’t have a car when I was on mat leave with Owl so I was housebound, but now that PH is home on disability I can take her out shopping and she is out of the house almost every day.

But she is always on ME. I am her primary and virtually sole caretaker.

She is almost never held by anyone else except her father, and that’s only for short periods. We haven’t had a date night out since she was born, partially because we were unable to get her on a bottle and partially because PH has been unwell and has very little energy for evening shenanigans, so she has never been left with a sitter.

Owl, on the other hand, was FORCED onto a bottle and left with a sitter on a bi-weekly basis from a month old onwards. He was cared for by a rota of friends and I think he learned early that lots of people have the ability to care for him.

Fritter, on the other hand, probably thinks she will die if I leave the room because she doesn’t know otherwise.

Now that she is on solids we are working on this problem. Our first step is to get her to trust her father to look after her. Now that she’s past the screamy newborn stage he can play with her and put her in her high chair and feed her and she will learn that I am not the only person in the world who can feed and clothe her. Then we’ll start leaving her with other people.

Mockingjay Part 2  is in theatres now, so we consider this an emergency. We missed Mad Max and The Martian but we aren’t missing MOCKINGJAY.

Sorry, kid.

Now, let’s talk about her looks.

Everyone says she looks just like Owl, and it’s funny because she does, and she doesn’t.

Owl has my eyes and his father’s eyebrows. She has her father’s eyes and my eyebrows. Overall she looks more like me than Owl, and people have noticed that.

That being said, there really is a resemblance, especially when I compare photos of them at similar ages and clothing.

No matter whose various body parts she has, her face ultimately looks like herself. I do love her little face. She gets such derpy expressions sometimes that it seems easy to underestimate her, but I think she’s actually pretty bright.

She was reaching for things early, and she studies how things work. She studies my reactions, turning to search my face for clues about what is happening around her. As I have already mentioned, she will initiate peekaboo and listens for a specific verbal cue before whipping the blanket off of her face.

It’s hard to explain but I just have this creeping feeling that there is a keen intelligence behind that cabbage patch face. Maybe I’m just being a doting parent. We’ll see.

In the mean time, I am just enjoying her babyhood. I can’t stop cuddling her like she’s a stuffed toy and kissing those chubby cheeks. And even though I know that I need to get out to see Mockingjay, and that she needs to feel comfortable with other people, I have no real desire to pass her off to other people.

She’s my last baby, and it goes so fast.

Incredibly Belated Halloween Awesomeness

Tags

baby, costumes, Hallowe'en, skeleton

Sorry I have been so absent. Life is actually going fine, it’s just… full… and the blog has fallen lower down on the priority list. But I miss it so I’m catching up.

Look! Cute Halloween pictures!

Owl wanted to be a skeleton. Well, actually, at first he insisted on a cute Dia de Los Muertos dress costume with a pink frilly skirt (you know how he loves those).

I eventually caved to the demands with reluctance, not because it was a girl’s costume but because it was still three weeks until Hallowe’en and he has all of the focus and determination of a light autumn breeze.

I kept the receipt.

Sure enough, two weeks later he spotted a green skeleton costume and immediately changed his mind.

I was annoyed but also relieved, because the girl’s costume had me concerned – he was supposed to wear his costume to school for the Hallowe’en parade and I didn’t want to expose him to misogynistic kids teasing him for wearing a girl costume.

I found a skeleton costume for the baby and I turned a kid’s skeleton t-shirt into a cover for the ergo and cuteness ensued.

The 2nd Labour Story Part I: In Which Castor Oil Is Put To The Test

Tags

baby, birth, castor oil, contractions, labor, labour

Most women I speak to tried something or other to kick start their labour. It seems strange to try to trigger an event which is generally recognized as one of the most painful experiences a woman will endure in her lifetime. But I guess we do it for the same reason that PH always eats the least favourite part of his dinner first – to get it over with.

For me, the real spur was fear of being medically induced, which I had already experienced and was not anxious to repeat.

I knew that castor oil was my best hope, but I also felt rather pessimistic about it. I suspect that if left to its own devices, my body would carry the baby past the 42nd week mark.

Probably, castor oil would just cause me horrible diarrhea and I’d still have to be induced on Tuesday.

So I started with a small spoonful on Saturday. Most recipes that I saw involved 1-2 tablespoons.

I took a TEASPOON and waited for the diarrhea.

No diarrhea.

No baby, mind you, but no diarrhea.

So with increased boldness, I took two tablespoons on Sunday, mixed in with my yogurt, and waited.

…and waited.

….and waited.

In Which I Try To Use Worry As A Weapon To Fight Off A Bad Ultrasound Outcome…

Tags

20 week ultrasound, anxiety, baby, defects, fear, miscarriage, pregnancy, worries

My 20 week ultrasound is tomorrow, and I’m doing my Anxiety Girl thing.

Back when I was in my Generalized Anxiety CBT group, they talked about how pathological worriers will often suffer from the superstitious belief that  their worrying is actually productive.

Then I raised my hand and told them my own personal theory of worrying, which stunned them for a moment, and then the leader said,

“That is the most COMPLEX rationalization of anxiety I have EVER heard.”

Wanna hear it?

Of course you do.

Okay, as you may know, one of the many bizarre and perplexing things suggested by Quantum Mechanics is that we could very well exist as one universe in a vast multiverse – that there are alternate universes created on a quantum level for every possible outcome. There could be thousands of YOUs out there, all living similar but slightly different realities.

And yet we only experience it as one lifetime, right? My particular consciousness is separate from the consciousnesses of all the other Carols out there – thousands of things could happen to various Carols throughout the multiverse but I will only experience one of those.

Maybe in another universe, my last pregnancy didn’t end in a miscarriage.

Maybe in another universe, I stayed with my first boyfriend and never married PH.

Maybe in another universe, I didn’t contract that weird disease (I went back to the internist the other day, by the way. The rash keeps coming back, so I spend half my time scratching off my own skin, and lately I’ve been hearing wooshes in my ears…).

Anyway, here is my theory: if I concentrated hard enough, maybe I can CHOOSE which reality my consciousness stays in. Maybe by WORRYING that a certain bad thing will happen, I can consciously AVOID it happening to THIS PARTICULAR iteration of my consciousness. Of course bad things still happen, but aren’t they always different bad things from what we expect? Aren’t we always blindsided by the one thing that DIDN’T worry us?

My GAD group used that as proof that worrying doesn’t help. I suggested that maybe it means that our worrying needs a broader spectrum.

Of course, it’s crazy, and the CBT stuff helped me drop a LOT of that. I don’t worry nearly as much as I used to and look what happened! I had a silent miscarriage and walked around with a dead baby inside me for weeks.

So, this time of course I was terrified of a bad outcome and my 8 week ultrasound was clear. The baby is still alive – I can feel little kicks and twitches at night and sometimes around noon. But all kinds of bad things could happen at tomorrow’s ultrasound. The baby could be hideously malformed. It could have soft markers indicating Down’s Syndrome, or worse, another Trisomy that is seriously deadly. Heart defects, spinal defects…

So far I have googled Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Anencephaly, and have read over 20 personal stories from people who had horrible news from their 20 week ultrasound and either ended up deciding to terminate or carrying to term and then taking photographs of their dead/deformed and dying baby. For some reason, ALL OF THESE people are deeply religious and use the word “sweet” and “angel” multiple times.

Not sure if seriously defective babies are some kind of Trojan that Jesus uses to infect people or if only religious people have the strength to document their experiences. Could be both.

I’m also wondering what we’re going to do with Owl if the news is bad. We haven’t out-and-out told him that I’m pregnant. He has noticed that my stomach is getting bigger and has asked several times if I have a baby in there. PH finally  told him that my body is TRYING to grow a baby but we don’t know if it has been successful yet. This prompted him to say loudly “You can’t be making a baby, Mommy! Daddy’s PENIS isn’t in you VAGINA!”

We were in Cost Co at the time. Several people looked around. Kids are great.

Anyway. We told him that tomorrow we will go see a special doctor who can look in my belly and tell us if there is a baby in there. In an ideal world we will be able to bring him in, tell him he is going to have a little brother/sister, and show him the baby on the screen.

But if it’s terrible news, how do we keep his infernal curiosity silent long enough to receive the bad news, discuss the options and digest it all? How do we explain to him that yes, there is a baby in there, but it may not be okay? What do we say to him when we’re told that it’s a boy/girl but it has a hole in the heart/no brain/appears to be an octopus?

 

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Now if you excuse me, I need to google more weird things that can be found on a 20 week ultrasound so I can ensure that our baby doesn’t have them.

The Girl Diet

Tags

baby, boys, diet, gender, gender selection, gender swaying, girls, low calorie, pregnancy, sex ratio

PH and I need to have a girl next time because we can’t work out a boy name. We’ve vetoed each other’s favourites (with the exception of Owl’s name, a favourite of mine that PH didn’t mind) and cautiously accepted as “maybes” some other suggestions.

Girl names are easier.

We worked out several possible girl names as well as Owl’s name before we even got engaged. We know the name of our future girl.

So this time, we’re going to try to have a girl.

When I found out that Owl was a boy, I had a lot of mixed emotions. On the one hand, I have always wanted a boy. Whenever I dreamed of babies, they were boys. I LOVE little boys. I’m not so hot on little girls. They’re manipulative and often shallow and obsessed with their Barbies’ hair.

So I was glad I was getting my boy.

But PH wanted a girl. PH isn’t big on men in general. He likes and admires all things female.

So I was concerned that he was disappointed.

He has never expressed any disappointment – he loved Owl from the moment he laid eyes on him – but he has teased me about the fact that I got my boy.

“Hey, it’s your sperm that determines the gender,” I would say defensively.

“I gave you millions of girl sperms! You picked THIS one!”

It was all a big joke, but I got hired on Elance to write a series of articles about selecting your baby’s gender earlier this year and I learned a few things:

1. While the gender is in fact determined by the man’s sperm, the woman’s body has final say on which gender it produces.

2. Boys are slightly more common than girls, 51% of babies being boys.

3. The world is full of myths about timing your intercourse to have a certain gender, assuming certain positions etc and all of this is completely unsubstantiated by modern science.

4. Women (and other female mammals) who are stressed, eating low fat or low calorie diets, or living in crowded situations, tend to de-select males, and start producing more females. The effect can be as much as 60-80% females born over males. Women who eat high calorie diets experience the opposite – 60% more males than females.

The idea is that if resources are low, females are a better bet. We only need ONE male to repopulate the world, but we need a lot more women. Also, since male babies require more calories to make, a female is easier to put together if there isn’t a lot of food to go around.

It’s called the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, and there seems to be a lot of research to back it up. 

Male blastocysts also appear to be less hardy – they don’t absorb sugar as well from the uterine environment and are less likely to survive to implant in the uterine wall if the mother’s blood sugars aren’t stable.

The difference is such that just skipping breakfast can affect your chances of having a boy.

So…. guess what I’m doing?

I’m back on My Fitness Pal, logging my calories, and I’m skipping breakfast.

I’m not cutting back on calories dramatically. After all, if a woman is starving she’s not likely to conceive at all, and honestly a second boy would not be the end of the world. PH would love him and still consider our family complete.

But I would like a girl, too. First, I’ve done the boy thing and now I’d like to try the girl thing. Second, while I’m not big on little girls, I would like to have a grown daughter some day.

Plus I just like experimenting with science, especially science that motivates me to lose weight.

So I’m on a restricted, but not unreasonable, low calorie diet and skipping breakfast.

Que sera, sera.

At least I can tell PH that I tried!

…And yes, I will stop the low calorie diet the moment that second line forms on the pregnancy test.

Potty Training Your Puppy, I Mean, Toddler

Tags

2 year old, baby, conditioning, house breaking, motherhood, parenting, positive reinforcement, potty, potty training, puppy, toddler

So, when potty training Owl, I’ve been working off of the basic tenets of puppy potty training. I’ve received tons of advice for potty training Owl and have incorporated some of it into my program, but it’s always easier to work off of what you already know.

And so, for anyone else who finds dogs easier than kids, I present:

Potty Training Your Puppy Toddler

substitute dog with child and grass with potty

Step 1: Allow your  puppy toddler to roam around the house, while you watch carefully.

Step 2: Take your puppy toddler to the appropriate location on a regular basis, most notably whenever he/she wakes up, has played for 10-15 minutes, or has eaten.

Step 3: If your puppy toddler urinates or has a bowel movement in the correct place, make a big deal out of it. Have special, very high value treats that you dispense only when your puppy toddler has voided in the correct location.

Step 4: If your puppy toddler begins to urinate or have a bowel movement inside while playing, interrupt the behavior (by picking him/her up or simply saying “oops!” or clapping your hands to distract him/her) and immediately direct him/her to the correct location. Hopefully he/she will finish urinating or defecating there.

Do not punish mistakes; simply try to interrupt them. Potty training is about conditioning correct behaviors.

Step 5: If your puppy toddler manages to urinate or defecate in the correct place once redirected, throw a big party and dispense the usual treats, even though this started with a mistake. What your puppy toddler will remember is that urinating/defecating on the floor resulted in interruption, while urinating/defecating in the correct place was highly rewarded.

Further adjustments: Since puppies are naturally naked, it is easy to spot urination and bowel movements as they happen. For this to work with toddlers, they must be similarly unencumbered. A collar shirt is optional.

Further adjustments part the second: Toddlers seem to respond better to smarties and similar small sweets than they do to freeze dried liver or cut up hot dog, but this may vary from toddler to toddler.

Congratulations!

You have begun the process of potty training your puppy toddler! While you should see dramatic improvements within a few days, the process may take several weeks to months to complete. Consistency is key!

 

In Which I Get Medical Advice From An Oompa Loompa, And Distrust It

Tags

baby, colds, common cold, coughing, daycare, doctor, pediatrician, sick, sleep, toddler, virus, winter

Owl coughs.

He’s been doing it for months and months. Ever since he got croup, really. It’s practically part of his personality, now. We hardly notice it. His nose runs, and it gives him post nasal drip, and then he coughs, mostly at night when he’s lying down and we’re trying to sleep.

(Incidentally, this is hilarious, especially when you’re really tired.) 

At first I took him back to the doctor for it. Each time the doctor told me it was “probably viral” and that colds are common in the first winter in daycare.

“He’ll basically have colds non-stop all winter,” said the pediatrician jovially (my pediatrician looks exactly like a human sized Oompa Loompa. Not the weird orange men from the Gene Wilder film but Oompa Loompas as described by Roald Dahl).

How I imagine my doctor’s family must look

Plus Owl tended to pick up worse colds from his visits to the doctor’s office. So I gave up.

But Daycare Lady didn’t.

“I’m sure he needs antibiotics or something,” she said. “He’s always coughing, and it sometimes sounds like there’s boiling water in his chest.”

Every now and then the coughing gets worse.

It happened again this weekend. His coughing was so bad that PH was up with him again and again in the night, and gave up entirely at 3 am  when he handed me Owl in bed (usually it’s between 4:30 and 5:30 am when Owl joins me in bed).

Even in the car he’d cough and cough. When he breathes his chest sounds like it’s percolating coffee.

After the third night of this PH said, “take him to the pediatrician.”

Daycare Lady wholeheartedly agreed.

“You have to PUSH them. My brother is a pediatrician and when my little girl was small he told me that from what I was saying over the phone, he was sure she had pneumonia. I took her to the ER and the ER doctor said she was fine! Viral! Go home! So I said “you PROVE to me it’s viral!” and I insisted on an xray and the xray showed pneumonia!”

So I went in determined this time.

When Jolly Doc came in I explained that he has been coughing for months. Sometimes it’s worse than others but always THERE.

“Does it get better and then worse again?” he asked.

“Yes!”

“It’s a cold.”

“An eight month long cold?”

“No, he just keeps getting colds one on top of the other. Happens all the time in daycare in winter.”

“But it’s June!”

“The cold season seems to be lasting longer than usual. We’ve had a cool spring.”

“But there’s only four other kids at his dayhome and none of them are sick!”

“You can’t tell me that the other kids never get colds.”

“No, they get colds occasionally, but they get sick, with stuffy noses and coughs and fevers and then a week later they’re over it. Owl’s symptoms are non-stop, and his nose rarely gets really clogged. It’s just constantly draining clear or yellow snot.”

“Because he keeps catching new colds before the old ones are done! I see this all the time. There’s no point in doing tests and no medicine will help you. His lungs don’t sound asthmatic, and I don’t think it’s allergies – you say it happened all through the winter, so it’s not likely seasonal.”

“Some units in our complex have had problems with mold, but we vacuumed and washed his bedding…”

“Yeah, and he hasn’t had a history of lung problems or breathing problems. This doesn’t look like allergies. It looks like a cold.”

“But he always looks like this!”

“Yes, well,” he laughed, “we call them “snot-nosed kids” for a reason!”

He DID say he would refer me to an eye doctor about Owl’s clogged tear duct. He said they usually resolve on their own but after a year he gets them dealt with “you’ve been surprisingly patient.”

Yes, well, considering my child is constantly coughing, a teary eye hasn’t really been high in my priorities.

I left feeling so frustrated.

How does he know that Owl hasn’t had the same persistant infection ever since October? Maybe he fights it off for a while and it keeps coming back. Why is he the only kid in his daycare who is constantly coughing up phlegm?

would you like some snot with that?

But I’m really frigging tired and I don’t see why he is constantly suffering from colds that no one else seems to be giving to him, or catching from him.

Owl’s First Haiku

Tags

baby, haiku, hockey, poetry, toddler

Hockey hockey ball
hockey ball, hockey ball ball
hockey hockey, yeah.

I have insomnia myself, so I have no advice for him…

Tags

baby, breastfeeding, cry it out, crying, newborn, overtired, sleep

My mum went home yesterday.

Babby decided to give us an easy day by going to sleep relatively easily and at regular intervals throughout the day.

Perfect Husband and I were like “We totally rock.”

Then night happened.

Now, most of his 6-7 hour screaming jags have taken place in daytime, and nightime has actually been fairly regular with wakings every 1.5-3 hours and reasonably prompt sleep after feeding/diaper changes.

Not last night.

Today, my first day home alone with Babby, was mixed success. Morning was awful, afternoon was fine. I finally managed to get him to fall asleep at about 10:30 this morning and collapsed into exhausted sleep until 1:30. So that was good. Then he fed, had a diaper change, went in the Sleepy Wrap while we walked the dog, fussed a bit and then slept in the wrap for an hour and a half. Then he woke up, was fed, went back in the wrap, fussed a bit and fell asleep.

This evening was more difficult. It took us an hour to get him to sleep after his dinner meal.

Now, here’s the thing I’m having a lot of difficulty coming to terms with – he seems to need to cry to sleep, sometimes.

The other night we were taking turns walking the floor with him as he had been alternately crying and feeding and crying WHILE feeding for hours. Perfect Husband was flipping through a book I had picked up at the library, called The Baby Whisperer. Now, I had already discounted this woman earlier in the evening because she talked a lot about how “no baby needs to eat more often than every two hours” and saying that once baby’s needs are met, he should be put down to “foster independence.” Both sounds like total nonsense to me and goes against what the lactation consultants and child psychologists say (babies carried more actually have MORE independence later on in life, because they trust their caretaker etc). So I had given her up as a resource. But then PH said,

“Are his eyes staring as if propped open by toothpicks, not focusing on anything?”

“Yes,” I said, “the dog just sniffed his face and he stared right past him.”

“Is he arching his back when he cries?”

“Yep.”

“Then the book says he’s overtired.”

“He hasn’t slept for five hours. We know he’s overtired! What does it say to do about it?”

The book said to lay the baby the hell down and let him fuss himself to sleep.

“That’s cry-it-out! You can’t do that to a newborn. I won’t do that,” I said angrily.

“No, no, it isn’t cry-it-out. She says to stay with the baby and let him know you are with him, but he needs to sleep and anything we do will just continue to stimulate him.”

So against my better judgement, Babby was laid down in his moses basket, covered snugly, and then rocked and rocked and rocked. And damn it all, it worked. Within ten minutes he had settled down.

“The book says he’ll wake and fuss three times before settling down for good,” said my husband.

And damn it all, that’s just what the baby did.

He slept for nearly four hours.

Early the next morning, the same thing happened – he wouldn’t go down. So Perfect Husband took him from me, laid him in his basket, and sat on the edge of the bed, shushing soothingly, watching him and occasionally holding down his arms  when he started to flail wildly (because he flails in his sleep and then hits himself in the face, which wakes him up and makes him cry because all he knows is that someone randomly hit him in the face…), while my baby cried and cried. It was breaking my heart, and I kept wanting to take the baby from the basket, but Perfect Husband reminded me that we had tried that and tried that. It was his turn to try.

It felt like forever, but it wasn’t actually all that long. In half an hour, Babby was out for the count, having had his three drift-offs-then-wake-up-and-fuss episodes.

But I was a mess.

Perfect Husband kissed me and told me he was proud of me.

“I don’t like this. It feels like cry-it-out and he’s just a tiny baby. If we let him cry like this it’ll break his trust in us…” I sniffled.

“You fed him. You changed him. You rocked him. He was still crying. He was crying because he was tired, and we can’t force him to sleep. He needs to learn how to do that himself and we can’t help him. Rocking him and walking with him just seems to overstimulate him. We never left him. We were right there with him, and I even held his hands.”

I knew all of this, and over the last couple of days, PH has been proven right time and time again. He cries… and then he will sleep. I did make PH promise to ignore anything this woman Baby Whisperer says about breastfeeding. I picked up a copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding from the library as well, and that has comforted me, because it specifically mentions a growth-spurt in the second and third week, which explains his constant feeding which has been leading to this overtired issue. The constant feeding does seem to be dying down – and my breasts are fuller than they were so I think he was just working to bring in my milk. It’s just a matter of getting him to go to sleep, the poor little insomniac.

Sometimes I can nurse him to sleep, which is always my first choice, but other times he just pulls away from the breast and squirms and cries and that’s when PH steps in with his shhshing noises and his heavy hands pinning down those flailing arms. A friend of mine even sent me a link indicating that some babies are just like this – they need to have a good cry. And the way he just suddenly goes limp after ten or fifteen minutes of fussing shows that it IS exhaustion – not a matter of him crying himself to sleep. But the waiting through that ten minutes is breaking my heart. At least, today, he fussed in his wrap instead of in his basket, and for some reason that was easier on me. I don’t know why it matters, him crying his heart out in his basket or crying his heart out in a carrier, but I can tolerate the carrier easier.

But that doesn’t help at night, when I have to put him down.

There HAS to be a better way.

Sleep, baby, sleep...

Poor kid inherited my insomnia and my webbed toe.

I’m sorry, Babby.

No Sleep For You! You Come Back, 18 Years!

Tags

baby, breastfeeding, cluster feeding, newborn, sleep, two week old

I’m almost done writing up the next part of the labour story, I swear, but it’s bloody hard to find a moment in which to work on it.

This kid doesn’t sleep.

Ever.

He is 16 days old and he doesn’t sleep. He suckles, and he cries, and sometimes he lies quietly alert and being all cure, before crying/suckling some more.

Now, I am not particularly disillusioned. I knew that having a baby would mean sleepless nights and a lot of screaming. But I did think that newborns, while waking up every couple of hours, would eventually go back to sleep for an hour or two at a time.

But when this baby  dozes off, I am constantly afraid that it is for the last time, and that the next wake-up, which will likely happen in the next fifteen minutes or so, will never, ever end. Even my mother is baffled by his constant wakefulness and insatiable hunger. On Facebook, people keep commenting on how alert he looks in his pictures. They’re telling us.

On Tuesday, he was awake from 5 pm until 1 am. On Wednesday he was awake from 2:30 pm until nearly 10:00 pm. On Thursday he was awake from 1:30 pm until 9:30 pm. Today he woke up at 12:30, and right now he has FINALLY gone limp and he is downstairs in his moses basket with my mother and husband hovering over him like he is a bomb ready to go off. He may wake at any moment.

If we’re lucky, he’ll sleep for a couple hours before he’s up and screaming for food again. My nipples, which were beginning to heal, are getting sore again.

I CAN HAZ BOOBAS??!!

One thing I will say about him – the worst of the feeding/screaming fits have mostly been during the afternoon/evening. He does often sleep for as much as two or even three hours together over the night and in the morning, although last night it took my mother and I from 2 am until 4 am to get him to go back to sleep for those couple of hours.

In the meantime, he’s learning lots. He has discovered his rattle, and he reaches for my shirt or my glasses when he is enraged. He’s working on rolling over. He has also decided to try and help me put him to the breast by clutching at the sides of my boob and exerting as much muscle strength as he can summon to bring the booba to his mouth. Unfortunately, he hasn’t worked out the difference between Push and Pull, so he actually sits there pushing the breast away while gaping frantically like a goldfish out of water, and eventually screwing up his eyes and wailing in frustration, at which point I snatch away his fists and plunk my breast into his mouth.

So basically he’s strong and fit. I, on the other hand, am a hollowed-out shell of a woman who has watched far more HGTV than any normal human should watch in a year.

Always-Awake Babby plots my demise

Can anyone explain to me why I feel guilty snatching half an hour to myself for a bath or to check Facebook, leaving the baby under the care of my mother or Perfect Husband? I mean, it’s not like he’s mine and only mine. He’s every bit as much my husband’s baby, and PH doesn’t feel the need to ask me if I can watch the baby for an hour while he reads cracked.com. But PH is happy to care for his son (if apologetic that he can’t help me with the constant-hunger issue), and my mother is delighted to have a chance to be useful before she leaves on Monday.

So how come I feel like I’m being selfish and asking them to do my job for me when I try to give myself a just few moments out of the rocking chair?